Sam Quinones keynoted the Strong Towns National Gathering last week and closed with a story about a tuba. If that left you wanting more, this conversation with Chuck Marohn is the place to start. This rerun from the Strong Towns Podcast follows Sam’s obsession with the “perfect tubas,” the almost-mythic York horns that tuba players have chased for decades. From there, he opens up a wider world of band rooms on the Texas border, long days playing at Disney World, and crowded Tuba Christmas events. Together, he and Chuck connect tubas, band culture, and strict musical standards to addiction, purpose, and how shared work and craft help hold communities together.
Hello, and welcome to Up Zone. This is Norm of Strong Towns. As you have heard, we've made some changes to the Up Zone 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. Some things are still the same in the podcast, and others we're modifying and working with. We'd love to hear your ideas and suggestions.
A shout out to several members that have sent in articles that we've been able to use in our podcast. We love that type of engagement and really appreciate it. If you want to send us some insights into how we can improve the Up Zone podcast, email us at [email protected].
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, going on walking tours. It was awesome. I hope 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, somewhere in the May-June window — but we know now where we're going to be, which is Sacramento. The great folks with Strong Sac Town, our awesome local conversation, are excited to welcome the Strong Towns movement even more fully into the spotlight in Sacramento.
Along with that, we had a fantastic keynote address at our national gathering in Fayetteville by Sam Quinones. Sam Quinones has been on the Strong Towns podcast before, and is also a regular speaker and author. 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.
This is a great discussion that Chuck and Sam have together. If you haven't checked out the Strong Towns podcast, definitely go and do so. That's our flagship podcast, and Up Zone 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. We certainly need this.
What I love about this episode, as you hear the discussion, you'll hear those notes of hope, the notes of endurance, notes of confidence, that despite all manner of troubles and ails, there are things that we can learn from humble communities — gatherings of tuba players who know that they themselves can never be the simple single star of the show, but are always better when in performance with others, participating in bringing about the fullness of what a band's sound can truly be.
If I think about a Strong Towns member, 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. With that, I hope you're inspired. Take an opportunity to listen to this fantastic conversation between Sam and Chuck. We'd love to hear your feedback on the Up Zone Podcast — email us at [email protected]. Also, look ahead: I look forward to having you in Sacramento. I hope you enjoy this special replay episode of the Strong Towns Podcast on our Up Zone feed today. Thanks so much. Enjoy.
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 and Dreamland. I know we talked about an article you wrote about a town in Kentucky, and 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, I think twice.
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. Thank you very, very much. I've always appreciated our conversations — very thoughtful and very cool. It's wonderful to be here.
I'm going to rely on you to tell a lot of stories here, because I literally have no notes. I just have this book. You're talking to a band nerd — my wife's a band nerd, my kids were band nerds. I did percussion, so I'm a rhythm person, close to the bass. Every aspect of this book was so beautiful. I got to tell you, there were a couple of times where I got teary eyed. Your writing is so good. Anyway, I'm thinking the place we should start is the idea of the perfect tuba. What is this concept of the perfect tuba?
I never was in band. I don't play the tuba, I don't play any wind instrument. But this book just kind of took me over.
One reason was that normally I'm a crime reporter. My two books prior to this were 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 inspiration from hard work, from what they do with their own capabilities — honing those talents and capabilities.
Years ago, I did a bunch of stories about the tubas' popularity in LA when I was working for the LA Times, and 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, and it was just this wonderful revelation. I thought that was a powerful thing.
Along the way, what kept me going was a conversation with one tuba player, a 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. We were having this long conversation, and I would just call these tuba players up and say, 'Hey, tell me about your life.' Bob told me about this. He said, 'Have you heard about the York Tubas?' I had not. There are these two holy grail tubas, this magical ledger. There's only two of them, and they are the most beautiful, wondrous tubas ever invented. I'm sitting there on the other end of the line going, 'What the hell is this?'
But sure enough, there are 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 — let's call him portly — had no lap and couldn't play it. He was a well-known tuba player, Philip Donatelli. He sells the tuba to his prize student, a young man named Arnold Jacobs, who at the time was about 16. Donatelli had said to the York Company, 'I need a tuba that sounds like the bass organ,' this bone-shadowing thing. So they made him one, but they didn't realize it at the time — York had also made another one, a prototype.
So there are these two tubas. Jacobs plays the one for many, many years, then hears there's 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, he turns these York tubas into legendary, mythical, holy grail instruments. One guy put it that it's an honor just to be in the same room with them.
The York company fell on hard times, became a munitions factory in World War Two, and after that never recreated the wondrous workshop in which they had built the probably the best tubas in America — probably the world. They went out of business in 1972. All these companies through the years have tried to replicate those two tubas, because there's this huge demand for them. There was a big growth in tuba players, and they call it the...
Stradivarius of Tubas.
The Stradivarius of Tubas. Jacobs is part of this. He talks about his tubas all the time, and it's a time when tuba players are looking for heroes. Jacobs is one of these guys who plays masterful solos, and they're just incredible players. Part of that is these two tubas that are just this wondrous thing.
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 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, and everyone's trying to replicate it, and no one can.
Then I met Bob Carpenter and another guy, Tom Treece, who were two tuba players and engineers in Orlando, Florida. Together, without any help from any corporate R&D budget or anything like that, they thought they had data that could show they probably could replicate the two perfect York tubas in a way that other companies had failed. That's 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, were 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. A tuba is filling out the sound — it's a subtle instrument a lot of times, 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 — this astounding thing. For people who are close to music, I feel 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 says this is a Leonardo da Vinci-level thing.
I was walking through the Uffizi Museum in Florence. It's amazing, room after room after room. Then you turn the corner and what you see is like ten times greater than anything else, and that's the Leonardo da Vinci work. It just blows you away, and as a simpleton I can recognize the difference. What you described to me was like that difference in a tuba.
Yes, and also the interesting thing about the tuba — the other thing that connected up to my last two books — is that it feels very much to me like the tuba is a community enhancer.
Without a band, you cannot have a football team. Without a good tuba section in the band, you cannot have the band — it just falls apart. It's about cohesion and bringing people together. Part of the problem for tuba players is that they very frequently get typecast: the tuba can only play whole notes, you're really not up for the great musical virtuosity that we find in, say, violin or trumpet, or what have you. 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, really trying to perfect their skills, but the tuba itself was this gorgeous instrument of community and enhancement, and yet completely ignored. The same with band directors. I wanted to write about band directors 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 bringing people together? Where you get your great joy is watching the lights go on in the eyes of your students who figure it all out.
It was like one startling realization after another that connected the instrument to issues I'd been writing about in my previous books, but also to ideas that I think we have gotten away from in this country — hard work, focus. In this time of babbling distraction, you don't get anywhere with band or tuba without really quiet focus and patience. In a time where we're so isolated, collaboration with others seemed to me like almost a radical idea. 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 — almost like the nuns rapping you on the wrist: 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 their website, and it has a picture of all the students. It's so beautiful. I'm in love with Roma High School now.
I came across Roma at a tuba conference — believe it or not, I went to two tuba conferences. This one was in Phoenix. I met tuba professors from South Texas, from the Rio Grande Valley, which is where Mexico and the US meet at 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 thinking, it's awfully hard to train these kids to play the tuba, there are no jobs in that. And the professor says, yes, that's normally true, 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. I asked, 'Well, how many band instructors do you have per high school?' I was normally used to maybe three or four. He said nine or ten. What are you talking about?
That led me into this whole story of how they teach band in many schools down in the Rio Grande Valley, and it led me back to this strange character named H.E. Nutt, who was like this Buddhist monk of band directing — didn't care about the world's frivolities, just wanted to teach proper band baton technique. He's doing this in a school in Chicago. He teaches all these students, they go out and spread 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, Al Cortinas, who was a band director for many years. Band 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, 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. Two things begin to happen that lead him to transform Roma High School band into what it became. One is that the drug cartels are really expanding during these years and offering an alternative — easy money, big fancy trucks, all that. At the same time, band competition is getting much more severe, really favoring wealthy schools with lots of money for new instruments and lessons. 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.
So he devises a whole system. He comes to Roma, hired with this system of creating top-flight bands from kids who can't afford music lessons. The way he does that is by convincing — to their great credit — the school district and school board to invest heavily in band instructors. No longer is it three per high school; now it's like nine or ten. But they don't just teach high school — they start with sixth grade. If you're teaching clarinet, you start teaching sixth grade clarinetists. You meet them in middle school, teach them there, then up through high school, and you have your lessons with them, then marching band practice. This is true for French horn, tuba, drums, and all the rest. All these instructors become the teachers these kids cannot afford.
He begins to build something huge, starting very strong with the young kids — real strict attention to detail, playing these notes nice and slow. You'd think the kids would hate it, but actually the kids are on the edge of their seats. 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. 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 tenth, eleventh, twelfth grade are competing head to head with the wealthiest suburbs of Dallas, 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 — like, '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 since they are so expensive, and you can't take them 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, wind up playing tuba. Is that right?
That's a great observation. Yes, exactly right. Maybe because you have to try harder — you are marginalized. I've been writing most of my life about marginalized people, drug addicts, and in my two previous books I lived ten years in Mexico and wrote about people on the margins of Mexico. That was my first book, in fact. I find 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've met. I don't want to talk to a celebrity — they don't have stories that would interest me. Tuba players, because they're really on the fringe — band is already on the fringe in most social circles in high schools, and tubas are on the fringe of the band. It's a very different group of people, mostly boys. Most people don't play the tuba because they wanted to. They play it because they were late for band class on the first day of sixth or seventh grade, all the other instruments were taken.
That's why I wanted to write about them too — because they nevertheless find this deep, enduring passion for this instrument. 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. The tuba attracts kids who have been told they're not worth much, and the tuba shows them they actually are worth a lot if they put their heart into it, if they 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, meaning 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? As I'm reading your book, you say it in the margins, but I feel like a big part of this is 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 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 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 about kids and these band directors and these tuba players — I thought I was done with that, and then it took me right back.
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 lightning bolt — 'Oh, I love this, now I'm going to do it.' 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 'take it easy.'
These kids are in music, but then I realized what they have found is through the tuba, or through band directing, this great purpose. 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 gratification — because you can feel that down the road you are going to be really good at this. The perfect tuba became almost a metaphor for any way that people find to avoid drug addiction, and you frequently don't avoid drug addiction unless you have deep purpose in life. Drugs fill a void frequently.
In this case it was tuba players, but it could be a deep love for gardening, or landscaping, or your lunch truck business, or wanting to be a great police officer. At a certain point, the perfect tuba became a metaphor for all the things that we love to do that require lots of work — the stuff that keeps us really centered and moving. These are enormously important to creating strong towns, healthy communities.
I don't think 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? I found myself enraptured by this idea that a tuba needs a room.
This is Jim Self, one of the former USC tuba professors, a big player on lots of movie soundtracks. I went to him because I wanted to talk — what's that?
He did the Jaws theme.
No, he didn't do Jaws. That was Tommy Johnson, his mentor. But he did the Close Encounters five-note sequence communicating with the alien spaceship. Anyway, I go over to his house a couple of times, talking with him, wanting to see what the stories are, and then he said, 'I built this practice hall on top of my house.' This is in the Hollywood Hills. If you're going to add to your property there, it's going to be a swimming pool or tennis court.
But this guy, Jim Self — wonderful man — wants a room. All his life he's practiced in practice rooms at universities that are like ten by ten. That's large enough for a piccolo, maybe for a trumpet. The sound wave of the largest tuba is 36 feet long. He wants a room where his tuba's sound can be liberated. When you play the tuba, it's breaking from the ideas of what other people have about the instrument, and therefore about you as a musician. It's this beautiful story of liberation.
He wants to liberate the sound. Over a period of years, at great expense, he clears away part of a hill — literally carves out part of a hill — and builds this 38-foot-long tuba practice hall, which I've been in several times. It's enormous. The best acoustics come when a hall is twice as long as it is wide, so it's 19 feet wide and 38 feet long — long enough for his tuba's sound wave to move freely.
But here's the other thing: it 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 he still needed to do this for his own liberation. He had the money, he had the ability. It became something of an obsession for several years as he finally built it, and then it became what almost any arts community needs: a community center, a place to meet and see other people. He's had many, many recitals in that hall, and it's a remarkable thing.
I did not know the story. It took me a while to figure out I was sitting in it. I think I did three or four visits with Jim over a long time, and finally I said, 'Wait — time out. This thing you built just for this?' 'Yeah.' Because the tuba showed him all the possibilities of life, and all of a sudden the architect told him, 'You could just remove part of that hill and you'd have it.' That's one of those stories that bowls me over when I hear it, but it doesn't come immediately. You've got to dig. You've got to be in it for a long time.
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 experience that full sound — that's my love and joy.
Completely. There's another guy in the book, Tom Treece, one of the two Orlando tuba player engineers who wanted so badly to pursue replicating these two perfect tubas. Tom spent his whole life like that. He was a tuba player from about 15 on, but he also became a candy maker. He invented a rosin for bass viol bows. He was a bakery consultant for Albertsons. He did all of this completely on his own — he never went to college, he just found it on his own. The tuba was emblematic of that. It was just finding who you actually are and going with it.
He said, 'If you only worry about how long something's going to take and how much it's going to cost, you never do anything interesting.' What I found in this book was that because people are tuba players, they are wondrously inventive. By the time a tuba player is basically playing whole notes, a violin player is playing Mendelssohn Quartet — you can't play tuba before age 13, really. A lot of people who went into the tuba historically did so through circus bands or local municipal brass bands. That's how you got into it, and so it breeds this very classic approach to life.
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're getting no acclaim whatsoever, and yet they're intensely inventive and curious.
When I was in high school, we had a great tuba player named Joe Koski. At the end of the senior year in our last show, he played Carnival of Venice and Flight of the Bumblebee. I appreciate it more now having read your book, because to me it was like, 'This guy is 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.
Sure, and it's all part of what I call the tuba civil rights movement, which really begins in what I also call Tuba Woodstock — the first gathering of all the tuba players in America, 1973, Indiana University. Hundreds of tuba players, and 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 a national tuba tribe. There's this awakening of tuba consciousness: 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 — limitations that we have somehow accepted or internalized.
As time goes on, you mentioned Flight of the Bumblebee — among tuba players, that becomes a little bit like how football players say, 'Dude, how much do you bench press?' Among tuba players, it's how fast can you play Flight of the Bumblebee? Rimsky-Korsakov, the guy who wrote it, expected it would run about a minute twenty seconds, and it's relentless sixteenth notes. People are getting it down to under a minute, and the fastest I've ever heard played was like 42 seconds, which is insane.
Go on YouTube and watch this, people listening. You can do 'Flight of the Bumblebee tuba' on YouTube.
It's part of that liberation again — we can do what you don't expect us to do. That is the beauty of the tuba, and frankly, 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 look what we can do. We don't get individual props for it the way athletes do, but you get these really beautiful values through band that sustain you through life, and the same is true of the 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. It became about how you develop these values, these habits, these characteristics in people that allow them to succeed. Then drugs become, 'Yeah, the hell with that.' Flight of the Bumblebee — I never believed anybody could play it when I started, and then over and over people would say, 'Oh yeah, dude, I can play that in like 65 seconds.' It shows yourself, but it shows the people around you: we're not whole notes, fat elephants, jokey clowns, none of that. It's a different way of viewing this unacclaimed, essential instrument, both musically and societally. As your whole thing is about developing strong towns, I think tuba and band are a big part of that.
It occurs to me, I've got three fingers that have been broken playing drums. 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?
The guy who really quantified all that was Arnold Jacobs, the great tuba player who became the first owner of those perfect tubas. He played for the Chicago Symphony for 40 years and retired in 1998, died ten years later. 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 most efficiently, because he needed to know that. He studied at the University of Chicago, went to the physiology labs, hung out at classes, and developed these techniques.
His way of teaching became remarkable — he was a remarkable teacher of wind playing, not just tuba. He was teaching people how to use that precious breath of air. I wrote two books about drug addiction. What is an opioid overdose? An opioid overdose is when you get so many opioids that 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 would have to be Arnold Jacobs, because he had to — because he had asthma.
He also quantified that as you get older your lung capacity reduces, and there's this whole feeling of the toll that brass instrument playing, especially the tuba, takes on you. I had one of those perfect tubas on my lap one time. I don't play the tuba, as I said. I tried to make a sound, to fill that thing with air, and all I could make was a sound like your stomach grumbling when it hasn't had enough to eat. The idea was that you had to learn to nurture that precious breath of air, and that's what his teaching was all about: doing more with what you think your body allows you to do. Because eventually all that's going to die out — by 65 you really can't play the tuba anymore, or at least very many people can't, and very often it's well before that. It's like athletics. It takes a lot out of you to play brass instruments of any kind, but certainly the tuba.
You had one moment in the book — 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. The lead pipe is the pipe that leads from the mouthpiece into the instrument — it's a thin thing, maybe a foot or a little longer, very thin, and it was original to the horn made by the York Instrument Company. We have to assume those men had figured out things about brass instrument making that were simply profound. These guys in the 1930s — nobody knows the names of a lot of the workmen in that company in Grand Rapids. They only know the foreman, a great brass instrument maker named Bill Johnson. But in the tuba they had figured out some profound things.
We've come to realize the lead pipe is a small part of the tuba — you'd think it's not that big a deal. Arnold Jacobs had some leaks in the lead pipe, so he took it to a shop on his lunch break from the symphony across the street. They thought they were doing him a big favor, and they replaced the old lead pipe with a new one and threw the old one away. All he really wanted them to do was patch up the leaks. He comes back and suddenly realizes, 'Oh my god, no, no.' They never found that original lead pipe, despite lots of searching.
It is viewed as one of the great tragedies of tubadom — and that horn has never played the same. Master technicians and premier brassware makers have tried to replace it with others, and it just doesn't play the same. So there are two of these perfect tubas. The second one is the one that's been used since that happened, but it's viewed as this dark day in the history of the American tuba. It just shows you, too, when you get to that level — it's like great athletics, like 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. And then it becomes the whole story.
Do you play music at all?
I play the guitar. I tried to learn the accordion — I still want to learn the accordion, because I love that instrument. 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, and I wish I had. But 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 — kind of plodding, sometimes kind of boring — but they don't mess around. I really marvel at people who have mastered their craft like that.
I had a scholarship offer where I could have done music, and I had this girlfriend at the time I was kind of serious about — she's now my wife, so that worked out well. I went into engineering, which a lot of people would think is completely different from music. I never thought they were. I played in bands for years, and when I was reading your book, I remembered this one time that was just amazing. We were playing a gig, and we started the song 'Jumpin' Jack Flash.' I was playing drums. At the beginning of the song it's just rhythm guitar, bass player, and drummer, so it's just the rhythm section — and the rhythm section, like the tuba, is just the foundation that everybody else plays on top of. Everybody else playing on top gets all the accolades.
The guy playing lead guitar broke a string. He quickly changed out his string, tuned up, then played, but it took maybe three minutes, and we hung on that intro riff for like three minutes. None of us wanted to get off of it. We were so in sync with each other. It was so beautiful. I've tried to describe to people how you don't even have to be great, but when you get to a point where you can play music with other people, there's a certain connection — I've had moments like that with my wife, with my parents, with my children, but also with other musicians. The music connects you in a way that defies physicality.
Such a beautiful idea. You mentioned drug addiction — let me depart a little bit. Think about what the effect of drugs is. You're feeling this contentment, this real unity. And you get there through hard work. You don't get there by going in one day and boom, here I am. No, you get there by practice and attention to detail. With drugs, drugs give you 100 times more euphoria than what you were feeling, with almost no effort.
You buy the dope, you turn on the TV — it's those kinds of things that give 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's something you never forget, but it's not overwhelming. It does not overwhelm your life, and the best example in the book is Willie Clark, the kid who starts the book playing in sixth grade, plays his B-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 and the band were lifting off because of his one note.
He later went to work at Disney World, which for a time was one of the top employers of tuba players in America, along with Disneyland. He was part of a group called the Tuba Fours — this deals with the terminal kitschiness of the tuba world, always making these dumb tuba puns. Stop with the tuba puns. Anyway, the Tuba Fours played five times a day for tourists at the park. There were two euphoniums — a small kind of tuba — and a larger tuba that he was playing. After a while, playing songs like 'Chattanooga Choo Choo' and 'Mr. Sandman' over and over and over, they would achieve this unity of mind. The minds of the four players just melted into one.
He played all his life, practiced so hard all his life. He didn't need a lot of money — he just loved those moments that you are describing right there with that band. That's part of the payoff of hard work, of collaborating with others. It's what makes tuba playing such a radical idea for our time: you need hard work, you need attention to detail and persistence through failure, and in a time of great isolation, you need to collaborate with others. It's this thing that keeps people coming back, chasing that. It can be addictive in some sense, but not really — because the amount of good vibes you get does not overwhelm your life. It makes you want to continue to do more.
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, and there's a certain culture around that.
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. I remember just thinking, 'This is what I want to do. I want to be a musician here.' Can you talk about the importance — and even the sadness — of Disney cutting back on that? Can you talk about the importance of Disney as a solid employer for tuba players?
This is true both in Southern California and Orlando. A major reason you had the ability to develop a musical career in both towns was the very stable salaries that Disney paid, and 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 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 at night somewhere too. So it would be ten years of complete immersion in getting your tuba craft to where it needed to be.
One of the stories I truly loved telling was about the Orlando tuba scene created in the 1990s, because Disney hired so many in-person bands, and most of those bands had at least one tuba. So you had a larger congregation — migrant tuba players traipsing down to Orlando to live. In most places, when you're a tuba player, you're alone. In most orchestras, there's just one tuba.
Now in Orlando, for at least ten years, probably more, there were all these tuba players. They all got together, they would have these famous parties — guys going all night, heavy drinkers at times. On the stereo they'd be playing tuba solos, and in another room they'd be repairing somebody's tuba, and another guy would be trying something while five people listened and kibitzed and corrected him. It was this glorious tuba moment when you could be as liberated as you want. As one guy said, it was like breaking the box wide open — you could write your own story, you could be whatever you wanted to be on the tuba.
This feeling of enormous liberation started with that Tuba Woodstock congregation in 1973. By the 1990s there were all these young tuba players saying, 'I want to do this, and I want to do that.' They found the beauty of the tuba in the first place 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,' and all of a sudden, through this instrument, largely through band, you find out you can do all this — you could be the star, or you could be someone of respect. 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. She would have totally freaked out if you'd said, 'Yeah, I want to be a professional tuba player.'
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 there that you talk about, a stuttering tuba player, and it hit close to home. My nephew was also 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? I've been to a couple of them. They are quirky, beautiful, interesting, fun, and festive.
What Tuba Christmas shows you is that out there in America, there is a massive community of former tuba players. Tuba Christmas exists because there are tuba players all across the country — 300-plus towns that do this, with anywhere from 10 tubas to 700, depending on where you are. The reason that's possible is because all these people have kept their tubas: accountants, engineers.
They bring it out once a year for Tuba Christmas, or maybe two or three times, but one of them is Tuba Christmas. They all come together and you see all these tubas suddenly arrayed before you. In many towns, it's hundreds of tuba players. It's a poignant thing, because it shows you how many people wanted so badly to be professional tuba players, and how difficult that really is to achieve. There are very few stable paying tuba jobs, and there are hundreds of university tuba programs.
You said in the book that we're putting out more tuba players per year than there are actual jobs total.
Yes, and it reminded me — I studied economics in college — of the critique of capitalism that Karl Marx made: grossly expanding the number of workers with the same skills while dramatically reducing the number of jobs, then having them fight among themselves. 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 in a symphony these days creates 200 applications.
Tuba Christmas is where you see all across the country how many tuba players are still out there, still with their horns in their closets or in their basements. They bring it out two or three times a year. They just could never make it work.
There's one chapter I just loved writing. It was about a guy just like that who went to school, was one of the best tuba players in his college, then realized that didn't really mean much, because there were other schools with much better players. He really wanted to be a solo tuba player and do it all, and then he realized it would lead nowhere. He would be impoverished and scuffling, living with one bulb in a little attic apartment. So he switched. He went over to veterinary science.
He is now an exotic pet veterinarian — one of only six. He's American but lives in Ireland, married an Irish woman. The beautiful part of the story is he was telling me, 'It feels like the tuba never left me. I had to leave it, but it taught me what it taught me: attention to detail, perseverance, hard work, interest in things that very few other people are interested in.' All of that made him into a very good veterinarian who repairs the wings of owls and other exotic animals. It was almost like the tuba was this permission slip.
A permission slip, right.
It was like a folk saint. A folk saint is a saint that you personally believe in — it may not even be sanctioned by the Catholic Church. 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: a beautiful personal life and a beautiful professional life, except it just wasn't with the tuba.
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. I love your writing, and I love the passion you bring to it, so thank you.
Chuck, I love Strong Towns. As an early reporter, I was a city hall reporter, so I've long kept an eye on these things. 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.
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. I'm a 50-to-60-book-a-year reader, so I don't throw that out lightly. I read a book a week. This one was amazing.
I love you, Chuck. Thank you so much. Talk to you later.
Everybody, thanks for listening. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town.
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