Ten Thousand and One Nights: A Piano Man’S Odyssey

By Carl Snyder

Ten Thousand and One Nights is the musical autobiography of Chicago Carl Snyder, who went to the Windy City in 1966 to write for Playboy Magazine and ended up playing keyboards on the road and in the studio with many of the worlds greatest blues artists. Carl played in forty-six states and eleven foreign countries, in Roman castles and Mississippi roadhouses; he has appeared on almost fifty albums, including two that won the Handy Award. Told in a quick-moving, anecdotal style, the book is replete with adventure and humor. And it presents a cross-section of American life and culture over the past fifty years, with cameo appearances by well-known actors, musicians, politicians, and athletes, plus other characters who are less famous but extremely colorful.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543453379

Carl Snyder

Dr. Snyder is a Grace Brethren pastor, evangelizing, discipling and church planting in southern Maryland. Raised in Philadelphia, PA, a USAF Veteran during the Viet Nam war, and a police officer in Prince Georges Country, MD, in the sixties, Carl graduated from Washington Bible College, attended Trinity University in Indiana, and graduated from International Seminary in Plymouth, Florida, before planting and serving at Grace Chapel in Mechanicsville, MD, while planting several other churches in Southern Maryland. Carl’s passion is help as many people as possible to know God in a personal intiate way and to grow in their relationship to Him.

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Copyright © 2017 by Chicago Carl Snyder.

ISBN:                   Softcover                         978-1-5434-5336-2

                            eBook                              978-1-5434-5337-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 09/21/2017

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CONTENTS

Chapter 1   Urban Roots; First Chords

Chapter 2   Wild Providence

Chapter 3   Paying Dues In Iowa And Rockport

Chapter 4   Chicago: The Sixties

Chapter 5   California Dreamin’ (Briefly)

Chapter 6   Chicago – The Inner Drive

Chapter 7   Gettin’ Bluesier

Chapter 8   The Jimmy Johnson Years

Chapter 9   Lefty Dizz

Chapter 10   Son Seals

Chapter 11   Junior, And Otis

Chapter 12   Some Of The Others

Chapter 13   The Boogie Woogie Flu

Chapter 14   Bringing The Blues Back East

Chapter One

Urban Roots; First Chords

The tipping point was when Dr. T., who gives me EGD’s and colonoscopies and things like that, asked if I’d encountered any famous people during my long music career. I mentioned a few names (Keith Richards, Chuck Berry, Jaco Pastorius) and he said, You should write a book! And I thought, OK, that’s it. I’m tired of people telling me to write a book. They say that when they hear about my encounters with those luminaries. They say it when they hear about my years of working with Son Seals, Junior Wells and Jimmy Johnson. And they say it when they hear about Son’s van breaking down in 50-below weather, in the middle of nowhere and in the middle of the night in a Canadian wilderness. Or about the three separate times in my life that I’ve had a knife (or something similar) held to my throat or chest. And I get tired of telling people, You go write a damn book! Because they think it’s easy, especially when they learn that I was once a professional writer, but it’s not; writing is hard, lonely work, and especially so when one has to relive portions of one’s life that were a bit difficult. Anyway, ready or not, here it comes, but with the caveat that I am going to stick with the story. In other words, none of the inner turmoil that might have accompanied the action, and none of the type of stuff that might interest the Inquirer or People magazine.

Speaking of which, I was a newspaper reporter and a magazine editor before I became a professional musician. In fact, I was supposed to be anything but a musician, but I followed the siren song of blues and jazz – African-American music, if you will – and ended up performing in 46 states and eleven foreign countries, as well as playing on almost fifty albums. As one might expect, I have quite a store of anecdotes – it’s been said that I have a tale for every occasion – and traipsing through them is a cast of characters (poets, politicians, gangsters, Indian chiefs) from every walk of life and every stratum of American society.

My story starts a few beats after midnight on the eighth of February, 1944, smack dab in the middle of World War II. The scene was Brooklyn Hospital, in that section of New York. Thelma, my mother, was a small person, never strong physically though she had great strength of determination; she had been paralyzed by polio at the age of two, and had learned to walk again after much therapy (which included swimming across New York Harbor) and what was then a revolutionary new idea, which was muscle grafting. So it took her three days to bring me into the world, and my dad, Leo Snyder, who was in the Army, went AWOL.

Then they shipped him overseas, first to Europe, then to the Philippines. I was probably two when I actually met him, and they tell me that I greeted him with a complete sentence (without telling me what it was). A proud Bostonian, he soon moved his fledgling family up to that city, where we stayed briefly with his parents in Dorchester before moving into an upstairs apartment on Marlborough Street downtown. At the first venue I experienced my first cat; his name was Tiger, and he was a street cat that my grandmother (Bubi) had taken in. She didn’t actually care much for the animal, but he was there to chase off the rodents, which she really detested. She would feed him table scraps, and when she called him from the back porch, he would come running home from wherever he was in the neighborhood.

At the second venue, I remember the steam engines puffing away at the nearby train station, and I remember playing at the Esplanade. But I don’t remember the fight. My mother told me that some little prince, from the Mideast or Asia or whatever, was there with his bodyguards, his father having come to Boston for some kind of medical treatment. And she said that when he took my favorite little toy truck, I popped him one.

I did the same thing after we moved to a modest, $55-a-month apartment on Wyoming Street in Roxbury, just up the hill from Humboldt Ave. I was three, and we evidently moved there in a horsedrawn wagon. Strangely, I don’t remember that, but I do remember my first impressions of the building, which seemed kind of fancy to me, with its tile inlay, its ornate mailboxes, and the deep, dark stairwell. It wasn’t long before I got into it with the kid next door, Stevie Kasper, and popped him one too, so that his dad chased me back to our apartment.

And it was in that apartment, when I was three, that my musical odyssey began. My father’s black baby grand Steinway dominated not only the sunny living room, but also the airwaves, since he would spent long hours every day practicing, composing, or teaching. He wanted to raise a musical prodigy, like Mozart, so he would give me lessons but I just wasn’t into it, and I wouldn’t practice, so some of the lessons ended with me getting knocked around. And eventually he would have to give up. The cycle was repeated over and over, even when he used Bartok’s Mikrokosmos as my text. That was certainly some interesting music. But not as interesting as the sound of the low A, at the bottom end of the Steinway; when I would reach up to bang it, it sounded to me like a drum.

It was also extremely interesting when my dad’s colleague at the New England Conservatory of Music, Halim el-Dabh, would visit us. Halim was an Egyptian composer who is still alive at 90-something, teaching at Kent State where he has been for many years and continuing to produce great third stream music. At our house, he would speak of sonic vibrations, which my dad thought was quaint; and he would play both the piano, for which he composed some strikingly original stuff, and a variety of African percussion instruments that he carried with him.

We were living in Roxbury because it was a neighborhood my dad knew, as a graduate of Roxbury Memorial High, which was down the street from us, and because we could afford it. As a matter of fact, there were two summers during our seven years there, from l947 to l954, when we couldn’t afford it. So we spent those two summers at my mother’s parents’ stone cottage in an extremely rural (no paved roads) part of upstate New York, so that as a child I got to experience both the country and the inner city. But mostly it was the latter, and in my opinion, Roxbury was a great place for a child in those years. Older than Boston, it was a deeply textured neighborhood with leafy trees and narrow streets with colonial hitching posts that were still in use, since the cops rode horses, and most of the pedlars made use of them as well. There was often horsepoop in the streets, and some of my black classmates who had moved up from Mississippi would shovel it up so their moms could use it in the little gardens they had in front of their tenement buildings. My earliest playmates in Roxbury were African-American, being the sons of the janitor. There was an apple tree in the backyard that produced many fruits, but all of them rotten, so that the three of us had a great time smashing them against the windowless brick wall of the garage that covered the rest of the block, downhill from our red brick house to the bustling, sometimes menacing world of Humboldt Ave.

Later I would get very close to the Bradow sisters who moved in next door after the Kasper family left. Joan, the younger of the two, was a wonderfully imaginative playmate, and we went so far as to stage a wedding, with Joanie holding a bunch of carrots as a simulated bouquet. But when I was seven (a year in which I got into several fist fights, thinking I was going to be a tough guy) the Bradows drove down to Humboldt Ave., turned right, and set out for California. One by one the white families were abandoning the neighborhood, and as time went on it got to the point where just about all my friends, especially the ones with whom I enjoyed spending time, were the black kids. There was Stevie Jones, the righteous young man who lived in the white house across the street, on the corner. There was Mike Parham, who would later go to Boston Latin with me; we played in the chemical, as he called it - the junk-filled yard of a chemical company in the neighborhood (my mother said it would blow up someday, and eventually it did). There was Alfred Brothers, who, like Mike, went on to Boston Latin with me; when we were about eight years old he told me he was going to be a jet pilot in the Air Force - and he actually went on to achieve that, becoming the first African-American to do so. There was Emmett Doe, old for his grade and big for his age; just up from Mississippi, he cut his leg while carving a balsawood totem pole at our apartment, but despite my protests, he refused to let my mother bandage it. And there was Willie Barnes, who lived in the basement of the building at the end of our street. Willie was a tough kid who had gotten bounced out of the Boy Scouts for fighting; I think he later became a fighter. If memory serves, he may have kept me from getting shaken down for the first time in my life, by a kid named Duke who showed up one night when several of us were in the Townsend Drugs, where Malcolm X worked while he was a Roxbury resident, which was during our time there. Without a doubt, the neighborhood was getting rougher. The streets had always been full of kids doing whatever, as in Breughel’s picture, but the boys’ games, starting with capguns, had progressed to bamboo spears and ashcan cover shields, and then to more serious violence. I had seen a couple of vicious street fights and also witnessed a kid getting hit in the eye with a rock by the time my parents finally packed it in and moved to Allston. After the excitement of living in Roxbury, the next two years were kind of a desert. I did sneak back to Roxbury once or twice, to stand on the sidewalk with Stevie Jones and listen to the sound of the wild bunch in the distance. And at my mom’s urging, I had Mike Parham visit me one day after our classes at Boston Latin, but he kept wondering What is there to DO here? and finally caught the MTA back to Roxbury.

During our second year in Allston my dad took me out in the back yard and started playing catch with me - he said later, so I would have something in common with other boys. And at 12, I actually made the local Little League, leading to a season in which I never got a hit but loved being on the team. Now I knew all kinds of kids in the neighborhood - but in the fall of 1956, my dad moved again, this time from the city to the small town of Holbrook, on the South Shore. It was not an easy adjustment for me, since I was younger and smaller than my classmates, and it was a radical shift in culture. These were streets without sidewalks, and tough farm kids, some of whom had never seen the city of Boston which was only forty miles away. After two years at an all boys school, the fourteen year old girls were terrifyingly mature. But at 13, I took up the trombone (at the request of the band director, who pulled me out of Latin class), and after playing a while with the school orchestra I joined my first band. It was called The Stardusters, and comprised of a couple of saxes, trumpet, trombone, accordion and drums. It was dance-band material (Sing Sing Sing was the group’s big number), and we were playing the tunes from sheet music. After one of the rehearsals - they were at the home of David Poole, one of the saxophone players - we all piled into someone’s jalopy and headed for Brockton, to buy pizza. It was a great thrill for me, as the baby of the bunch, and it got even better when they turned on the radio. In quick succession I heard the Everly Brothers doing Wake Up Little Susie and Jerry Lee Lewis doing High School Confidential, followed by Chuck Berry with Rock and Roll Music.

It was a doorway into a brave new world. And all of a sudden, I just couldn’t get enough of this music. My parents couldn’t tolerate it, so I would wait for the times when they were out of the house; then I would turn on the radio and cruise the dial. I started going to the record hops at the high school, just to hear the music (I couldn’t dance a lick; still can’t). And in the afternoons, when my parents were working, I watched American Bandstand. Every day when I was walking those two miles to and from school, often carrying a trombone case filled with books, those rock ’n’ roll horn riffs would be buzzing through my brain. And when I heard Fats Domino and Huey Piano Smith, I started wondering if I could recreate a bit of what they were doing.

So I started trying to play the blues, and of course it didn’t go over too well. My father said it wasn’t even music, and claimed I was knocking his piano out of tune, which I probably was. So now I was forbidden to touch the Steinway.

And that was the auspicious start of my career in music.

I should mention, because it gave me the on-stage confidence that has helped me tremendously as a musician, my brief acting career, which started while we were yet in Roxbury, and continued through our time in Allston, into my sophomore year at Holbrook High. Most of it involved the highly esteemed Boston Children’s Theater. To get there, I was, at the age of nine, taking the subway by myself into downtown Boston. In my class, I was taught how to move on a stage; I was also encouraged, along with my classmates, to imitate the movements of animals and mimic the expressions and poses that we saw in paintings and photographs. At one class we were greatly entertained by the Pink Poodle Players - a puppet performance created by Gus Solomons Jr., who was one of the older students at the theater; Gus went on to become a well respected choreographer, writer and teacher in the world of modern dance.

My eleventh summer found me participating in a traveling theater group – the Stagemobile – that the Children’s Theater sent to playgrounds all around the Boston area. We had a truck that folded out into a stage. I had to help with that, and I had to apply and remove my own makeup; I don’t remember the story, but my character was Junior Ant. And wouldn’t you know, I caught a dose of pleurisy – the doctors said, from pigeons that were at one of the playgrounds where we put on the play – and ended up spending two weeks in bed, with every breath hurting.

There was also a performance on a local kids TV show (I think it was Big Brother Bob Emery), and a production of The Nutcracker at a big theater downtown, in which I played the Mouse King and got to do what many an actor has dreamed of – dying on stage, in a sword fight.

I also acted, with my father, in a production at the New England Conservatory of Music, in Jordan Hall. My dad was a graduate of the school, and was teaching there at the time. He had composed music to Stephen Vincent Benet’s Book of Americans, and it was being published by the Leeds Company. So the school put on an elaborately staged version of it, in which my dad played the role of a narrator, and I, at my dad’s instigation, played his son.

In my second year at Holbrook, I once again got involved with a theater production, when the shop teacher, Joseph Tarantino, decided to direct a production of Mary Ellen Chase’s popular play, Mrs. McThing. Quite naturally, I played the part of Howay, the kid in the story. There were many lines to learn, and there were some that I don’t think I fully understood, but the show was well received. And it was a great experience.

It was also the last time I acted in a play. And I don’t think I had the greatest aptitude for acting, but it was great preparation for a life in music. As the late violin virtuoso Eugene Fodor would say to me during a telephone interview, There are some nights when you ARE an actor!

In the fall of 1958 my parents moved again, for the third time in five years, and once again I had to cope with a new environment and a different culture. Now I was going to Quincy High School, a school of about 2,000 kids in a blue-collar city of 100,000 people; by contrast, the enrollment at Holbrook was about 400. So of course I got teased as a newcomer from egg country, which was ironic because I had actually spent the majority of my young life in the inner city of Boston. The next two years weren’t my happiest, as