Clarinet music turns out not to have been my destiny

I interviewed some Clovis Community Band folks before their recent concert.

I marveled at their enthusiasm and drive in getting together, playing their instruments, practicing and stuff.

I played clarinet in the junior high band back when I was a kid.

I joined the band because my mom told me to.

“You have to do something,” she told me back then.

I couldn’t dribble a basketball, my Phys Ed coach taught me how to catch a football, but I frequently ran the wrong direction. I liked baseball, but I was kind of disheartened when they got a triple play on me.

I did alright in Boy Scouts, getting rank and earning merit badges, so I thought that was enough.

So there I was in band, playing the clarinet, trying to keep the thing from squeaking too much as instruments that use reeds in the mouthpiece do.

We played all the great hits. Well, what the band director thought were great hits: “American Patrol,” “Barcarolle,” “The Hall of the Mountain King,” stuff I’d never heard of.

There were three of us clarinet players in the junior high band.

My rank in the band was “third chair.” I never understood how I was ranked or what I had to do to get “first chair” like Brenda Calder.

It didn’t matter if I was first or third chair, I still would have had to sit next to “second chair” Jeff Kramer who was always passing gas.

It was really smelly gas too.

I seem to recall he was proud of his special talent.

My buddy Catfish was in the band.

Catfish was “first chair” trumpet.

Now Catfish had a goal. He wanted to play trumpet like Herb Alpert, who had some top hits on the radio charts back in the day.

All I knew about famous clarinetists was stuff my mom told me.

She spoke of Pete Fountain. She even bought me a record and a book so it would be just like I was learning directly from him.

She spoke of Artie Shaw and his popular piece of music, “Frenesi.”

She talked about Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, and some guy named Acker Bilk who hit the charts in 1964 with his clarinet instrumental, “Stranger on the Shore,” a song she really liked.

I wanted my mom to be proud of me but playing the clarinet was like being in college or trying to date girls would be when I was older -- I had no idea what I was doing.

One time we got dressed up in our uniforms and played “Up, Up and Away,” a popular song of the day, at halftime in the big fall football game between the two high schools in town.

It sure didn’t sound like the song on the radio.

When we moved to Baltimore my parents put me in a private school.

And there was no band.

So there was a disconnect between me and the clarinet.

Here in the future I paid $10 for a clarinet at a Clovis yard sale a few years ago.

I cleaned it up, bought a reed for it and got ready to create musical melodies my momma would’ve been proud of.

That didn’t happen.

Years ago, around the turn of the century, I decided to call my momma and apologize for the stupid things I’d done, including not diving into the clarinet.

“Oh would you stop it. It’s all part of life,” Mom said, laughing.

Grant McGee writes for The Eastern New Mexico News. Contact him:

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