Road Stories: The Experiences of a Traveling Musician

By Peter Aven

Stories always have a lot of names of people and places. I have tried to retain as many original names as I could in the name of realism, but in order to protect identities and reputations, and also to followat least halfwaymy lawyers advice, I had to change about half of them. Wherever possible, I simply avoided names altogether, as in the bass player or the club owner or the town. Whenever there is a remotely negative connotation the names have most definitely been altered. There is also some fill-in work so far as dialogue is concerned. This bit of artistic license was taken not only because I cant remember every single thing everyone said, but also in the name of technical dramatic writing. There is a sprinkling of fiction in all storytelling. Think of it as the spices in the event-salad. I have tried to keep it to a bare minimum. The only ones who might choke on the pepper are the people who were actually there. And you know who you are.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 22, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469174556

Peter Aven

Peter Aven has performed and toured as a professional drummer and/or violinist for over thirty years, playing over two thousand gigs with eighteen different bands from all over the United States, in particular from the northeast. He attended Ithaca College and the Berklee School of Music. He also has a BA in English and is an award-winning poet. He worked for four years teaching English and music in the Boston public schools. He currently lives near Saratoga Springs, New York.

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Copyright © 2012 by PETER AVEN.

Library of Congress Control Number:                2012903590

ISBN:                       Hardcover                                   978-1-4691-7454-9

                                   Softcover                                      978-1-4691-7453-2

                                   Ebook                                            978-1-4691-7455-6

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Contents

Intro

On The Ocean

Mishaps, Prejudice, And The End Of The World

Alcohol And Fights

Religion

Staying Within The Law

Bad Weather

Strange Occurences

Valuable Instruments

Managers

The Band House

Riots, Mobs, And War

INTRO

by Dr. Manuel Aven

From the beginning of mankind’s civilized existence, there has been music. Someone beat on a drum, someone sang. And after that, there were wooden and bone flutes. And after that, strings were plucked and bowed. These primitive people liked the music that they made. It made them feel good, both to play and to listen to, and to take part in. It became an integral part of sacred rituals, fertility rites, funerals, and weddings—and it still is, to this day. Yes, the fertility rites are still there; in fact, they have been greatly expanded.

Music coevolved alongside mankind, and it is continuing to evolve. Gradually, people began requesting this desirable commodity so much that it began supporting the people who produced it. The process of civilization is also a process of specialization. People who made good arrowheads made arrowheads, people who made great cooking pots made cooking pots. Money was invented so that you wouldn’t have to bring your arrowhead maker a chicken every time you needed arrowheads. As any civilization evolves the tasks of individuals become more specialized. Music became a specialty, which could be traded or bartered, or paid for. Its material value as such was established, and became apparent. Someone, on some day long ago, was the first to pay a musician, with money, to play.

Winston Churchill said: The earth is vast in its expanse and man is a very small thing upon it. As a result, desirable commodities must be moved from place to place so they can reach the far-spread settlements of people to be consumed. Roads were an invention of ancient peoples for this purpose. As they were gradually improved, musicians began to travel on them, bringing their rudimentary—and, later, more sophisticated instruments—with them. The traveling musician had arrived.

My grandfather Michael Bronikovski was the chief engineer of a factory in St. Petersburg, Russia, that manufactured paper products. They did not only manufacture the paper itself, but they turned out a variety of commercial items such as pamphlets, and also playing cards. Russians loved their card games, especially the aristocracy. The king of Russia, Czar Nicholas II, and his court of nobility whiled away countless idle hours playing bridge, preference, whist, and maybe even that game of ill repute from the wild and distant American frontier—poker.

The king loved his card games so much that he decided that there must be new designs on the cards. He sent forth his ministers to scour the land for someone to come up with better jacks, queens, kings, and aces. They didn’t have to go far. Michael B. was right there in St. Petersburg. His firm was commissioned to come up with a whole new set of designs for the playing cards. They decided to base the new designs upon some of the nationalities making up the Russian Empire. Spades were to be the Tartars, hearts the Mongols, diamonds the Estonians, and clubs would be the purely ethnic Russians. The czar was consulted, and he approved the concept.

Dodging impatient calls from the minister of internal affairs, Chief Engineer Bronikovski and his team of artists worked for months on the project. When the king finally got his deck of new cards, he was so ecstatic that he decreed that Michael B. be immediately knighted and given the title of count. Knowing how to make the best of a good situation, Michael B. said he was exceedingly grateful, but if he was now a count, could his daughter Sophie please be allowed to go to the Smolny Institute, which was only for the daughters of Russians aristocrats? The king said sure, why not, and so Sophie, my mother, got to go to Smolny.

The regimen at Smolny, which is adjacent to St. Petersburg, was very thorough and very strict. These were to be the young ladies who would travel to the courts of the kings of Europe and the Far East, representing the finest part of the Russian noblesse, and they needed to be prepped meticulously for their role in life. They had to learn a lot of languages. Russian was allowed to be spoken only on weekends. On weekdays, they had to either speak French or German. All the girls had to also learn to play an instrument and sing in the choir. Sophie chose to play the piano and became, to my grandfather’s great delight, quite an accomplished pianist. Now my grandfather could have his own household piano trio—with him playing the violin, his son Nicholas the cello, and Sophie the piano. The three of them became so proficient that they gave impromptu concerts in the parlor of their home for their friends and neighbors.

In 1917, around the time Sophie graduated from the Smolny Institute, social and political unrest in Russia reached a boiling point, culminating in the Bolshevik Revolution. Czar Nicholas and his family were imprisoned in Ekaterinburg, and since the Bolsheviks couldn’t figure out what to do with them, they were all murdered in the basement. Not a good time to be a count.

In the south of the country, many factions loyal to the old regime—called White Russians—fought on against the revolutionaries. The British Empire, apprehensive of all this upheaval and uncertainty, sent an expeditionary force to Murmansk in Northern Russia, and also sent a considerable naval force into the Baltic Sea. The leaders of the nascent Soviet Union were quite unnerved by the approach of the most powerful navy in the world. They signed the Treaty of Tartu, guaranteeing the independence of the northern Baltic state of Estonia. The generous terms of the treaty allowed native Estonians living in what was now the USSR to move back to Estonia and take along with them their family members and household items. Around that time my grandfather suddenly died of natural causes. Sophie married an Estonian named Hans Ahven. They took the opportunity offered by the Soviets’ treaty with the British to escape what was going on in Russia and emigrated to Tallin, the capital of Estonia. It was quite a move. Among the household items they took along was Sophie’s full-sized grand piano.

As a mechanical engineer, my father Hans was in great demand in the newly independent republic of Estonia and swiftly got a job with the new government. He was easily able to provide for his wife and only child. With her musical background, it was inevitable that my mother Sophie would try to get me interested in music. First she tried piano lessons, which did not work out. I was more interested in playing with my electrical and mechanical toys, which were to me the Xbox 360 of my time. Next, she tried the violin. They got me a half-size violin and a bow. But none of us—neither my parents nor myself—could figure out how to get any sound at all out of the squeaky little thing. Being a man of decisive action, my father got Hugo Schutz, the concertmaster of the Estonian Theater Orchestra, to come over. Once Hugo had rosined up the bow (rosin is the dry stuff you have to rub on the horsehair to get it rough enough to make a string vibrate), he had me squeaking away in no time. My parents were so delighted that they hired him as a teacher. Before long, I was good enough to be seated last chair in the last section of the school orchestra.

A good friend of mine played flute in the same school orchestra. One day he let me try playing his flute. The very first notes I blew sounded so much better than anything I had been able to coax from that horrible wooden box with strings that it started up an instant attachment to playing the flute. I asked the school orchestra conductor if I could switch from violin to flute, and he very enthusiastically agreed. At home, I started playing the flute all the time. I bought sheet music and played various opera and orchestra parts. My parents got me flute lessons from the Estonia theater flutist Mark Halisto, and I improved steadily.

This was the period in world affairs when several countries in Europe—Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union—allowed themselves to be taken over by dictators: Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, respectively. These dictators, being bullies, began bullying smaller and weaker neighboring countries. The Soviet Union under Stalin attacked Finland, Mussolini beat up on Abyssinia, and Hitler embarked on an ambitious course of annexation in Austria and the Sudetenland. So successful was this bullying, and so complacent was the rest of the world, that the dictators were encouraged to continue on the course that led eventually to World War II. While Hitler was busy squashing Poland, his new ally Stalin—with whom he had made a deal—militarily occupied the Baltic States, including Estonia. Fake elections were held, and former government officials lost their jobs, or worse. Even though my father was only a subministerial official (his title was state controller), he was fired.

The new communist laws also stipulated that the children of such discharged officials be barred from getting a university education. The universities were forthwith to be filled with the children of the workers, whatever that meant. But Stalin had a soft spot for the arts, because the arts belonged to the people. So although my father wanted me to get a technical education in chemistry or engineering, and that is what I would have preferred as well, this was not possible because of his former position in the now-defunct government. But what was possible was to have me enter the Tallin Conservatory of Music, majoring in flute.

Remarkably, the biggest hurdle to my entering the Conservatory was that I had the wrong type of flute. I had what could be termed an old-fashioned flute, on which the notes of different pitch are produced by opening or closing to holes on the body of the instrument by placing one’s fingertips on the holes, sort of like a recorder. What was needed for Conservatory studies was a modern Boehm-type flute. But in Stalin’s new utopian peoples’ society, simple things were incredibly hard to get. Finally, with the help of my erstwhile teacher Mark Halisto, a Boehm flute was located and my father bought it for me. I entered the Conservatory and also was accepted into the Estonian Theater Orchestra. This was my first paying job as a musician. I also got a job playing flute solos on a radio program called Aspiring Young Musicians.

During this time the world war ground onwards. Stalin and Hitler were now fighting each other, and for a while Hitler was winning. In 1941, we found ourselves now under Nazi rule. This wasn’t a whole lot better, but the Nazis had mistakenly declared Estonia a Jew-free zone, so the real bad guys left most of the population alone. Then in 1944 we heard that Hitler was no longer winning, and that the Russians were coming back. Everyone knew this was going to be bad. It turned out to be very bad. Bent on revenge, the Red Armies rampaged back through many countries already ravaged by four years of war, raping and pillaging as they went. In one of the largest human migrations in history, over half the population of a dozen different nations fled westwards before the steamrolling Soviet tanks. The roads were clogged with both civilians and troops, who were strafed and bombed mercilessly by the Red Air Force. I said good-bye to my parents, whom I would never see again. I went westwards, intermingled in this great human crowd. I only had time to take one backpack. But in it was my flute.

I traveled a circuitous route through central Europe and eventually found my way to the American lines. I cover this journey in my previous book, The Wanderer. Like all soldiers do, the Americans were pilfering a bit. The first real American I met was a huge black corporal who, holding his M-1 carbine at ready, said: Give me your watch.

Thank God I knew some English.

I don’t have a watch.

Then how do you know what time it is? What have you got in the backpack? Let me see. We gotta search everybody.

Hastily I untied the top strings.

What’s in that brown case? he asked, peering into my pack.

My flute.

Yeah? Well, if you got a flute, let me hear you take it out and play it.

Carefully I opened the case and began assembling my flute. The large corporal took a couple steps back. At first I was afraid he was getting ready to shoot me, but then I noticed that a bunch of his buddies had shown up, and they were all smiling and waiting for me to play. I guess a nineteen-year-old kid with a flute wasn’t much of a threat to these veterans.

So I stood there in the middle of the dirt road and started playing orchestra parts that I knew. While I was playing, a whole bunch of them started appearing from the woods on either side of the lane. I had stumbled upon a transport company, which was actually quite a ways back from the front line. The American policy in this region was to segregate African-Americans into separate units and assign them supply and logistics missions. In my part of Europe, we weren’t used to that type of separation. So, surrounded by a lot of grinning and joking Americans, I went on playing until some captain or something broke it up. They liked me so much that they gave me some food, which I desperately needed. They let me load up my backpack with cans of a catfood-like paste that were some kind of rations. And even better than that, they let me keep my flute, which I still have to this day. In America.

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ON THE OCEAN

In 2002, as part of the band Synergy out of Philadelphia, I became an employee of Carnival Cruise Lines. They flew me from Albany, New York to Long Beach, California, there to embark on one of their megaships, the Ecstasy. The cruise went back and forth between Long Beach, south of Los Angeles, Catalina Island, and Encinada, Mexico, on the Baja Peninsula. The Ecstasy carried a crew of over two thousand and full passenger capacity was around four thousand. It had more deck levels than a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, and probably more interior space as well, including an eight-story central atrium with glass elevators. I’ve never been in the navy, but the ranks, rules, and regulations have got to be similar. Everyone in the large multinational crew has a status. At the top, of course, is the captain, who at sea has dictatorial powers, and his officers, who wear starchy white uniforms adorned with shoulder boards. The shoulder boards have various quantities of gold-embroidered stripes.

The pinnacle of civilian authority rests with the hotel director, who manages what is really a floating hotel, and our boss, the entertainment director, who’s in charge of trying to keep the teeming hordes of passengers as happy as possible, and of course to address their needs and complaints. After all, in a population of four thousand, there are bound to be a few dozen of those types that will find something