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I fell backwards into teaching, making it one of the core components of my professional life without even realizing it. If I had been more perceptive, in fact, I probably would have resisted, kicking and screaming every inch of the way.

Why?

Well, I come from a family of teachers. My mom is a teacher, my dad is a teacher, my brother is a teacher, many of my aunts and uncles on both sides of the family are teachers. Some kids have cartoons on over the weekend. My memories were of “In Search of Excellence” from PBS, with my dad highlighting passages in educational journals as he prepared for his classes. Maybe some kids want to follow in their parent’s footsteps, but I certainly didn’t. My goal was to move out of the bleak tundra that is South Dakota and become a big city musician with a big city career.

Now that I’m in my thirties, with several degrees under my belt, years of performances with groups like the Lyric Opera of Chicago, lots of experience as a ‘big city musician’, and a half-decade of running a university double bass studio, guess what I want to do?

Move back to small-town South Dakota and teach!

For me, teaching is definitely in my genes. I started doing it while I was in high school, foisting my crude theories on poor, unsuspecting middle-school students. I’d give anything to have a videotape of one of those first lessons of mine. Truly cringe-worthy material, I am sure. I did this off-and-on (more off than on) throughout my undergraduate and graduate degree programs, and I can’t say that these experiences made me change my mind about wanting to be a teacher. In fact, I think that it reinforced my desire to NOT become a teacher. I began to equate teaching with defeat in my mind, the easy path, the default occupation for a Heath. I practiced even harder, making it into the finals in major symphony orchestras, chasing that performing career with every ounce of my being.

As I finished my graduate studies I began to develop a perennial knot in my gut. What was I going to do? I kept getting close to a full-time orchestra job but getting axed without winning the gig. At the same time, I landed a handful of local gigs and began to assemble a career of my own.

My worries ended up being unfounded, and my performing career took off, although this performing career of mine did not contain that idealized full-time orchestra gig. I arrived at all of my rehearsals an hour or two early, made sure to practice every note of the part, and spent the drive to the gig listening to recordings, fully immersed in the process of music performance.

I got a call one day a couple of years after getting out of school from one of my former university colleagues. He had landed a high school orchestra director position in a prestigious local school district, and he wanted to know if I’d be interested in becoming the ‘bass guy’ for that district. I’d teach the high school, middle school, and elementary school bassists lessons, plus run sectionals and coach chamber music.

I had to think about it for a day or two. Up to this point I was basically a full-time performer, and every free minute was spent practicing, taking lessons, playing for colleagues, and gearing up for the next big audition. Did I want to make a move into teaching?

Another consideration—I was a full-time performer, but I was a BROKE full-timer performer. Classical music performance was providing me a living, but nothing more, and my shabby car and nasty little Chicago apartment were testament to this fact. I certainly could use the income.

I decided to take the teaching gig.

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The first trip out to my new high school job was a rude awakening—literally. My alarm started blaring at 5:30 a.m., startling me wide awake with a pounding heart and an aching head. I would quickly learn to deal with late night gigs and early morning teaching, but I was one cranky bass player as I headed out to the donut shop to fill myself with ‘teaching fuel’ (I like my coffee and donuts).

I made it to the school just as the bell rang, cramming my way with my bass through hordes of jabbering high school kids. My heart sank—this was what I had been spending my whole life trying to avoid. I hooked up with the orchestra director and was escorted to a coaching room for my first class.

I took the four your but quite solid bassists in that first class through the technique routine that my teacher at college had taught me. Even from that first class I remember what it felt like to create a class of my own, dividing it into technique and repertoire, gabbing with the students, fixing technical problems, and tuning chords. I may have been bleary-eyed and sleep-deprived, but I was also having a lot of fun.

I taught one more class that day as well as some private lessons. At the end of the day I was exhausted but also pleased with how the day went, and I had an odd feeling of satisfaction both similar and different to the feeling that I got after a great performance.

As the weeks passed, and I kept up my trips out to my high school job, something amazing happened:

My students started to improve!

This was evident in both the group classes and the private lessons, and although the rate of improvement varied from individual to individual, the overall increase in quality was obvious.

This was quite cool to me, and I began to enjoy it even more.

I also began to teach more, getting hired at the other high school in the district. Before I knew it, I was spending four days a week in this district, teaching four bass classes, coaching chamber music, and teaching around 20 students.

My practice time had taken a major hit, but I was happy about doing all of this teaching. I like being busy, and the life of a full-time performer usually includes some pretty significant down-time. My professional performance engagements continued to pour in, sometimes cramming out my teaching for a week or two as I spent time in various cities across the country.

My students started to succeed in demonstrable ways, securing the principal bass chairs for both the district and state All-State Orchestra (Illinois Music Educators Association) as well as principal spots with the Midwest Young Artists Orchestra and the Chicago Youth Symphony. I began to get a “rep” as a teacher, and the students began to flock to me like geese to stale bread. Before I knew it, I was teaching around 40 private students a week, filling all seven days with students and gigs. I landed a position at one of the University of Wisconsin campuses and began a life of crazy commutes on rural roads for hundreds of miles a day.

As my students began to get into big music schools (Eastman, Cleveland Institute, Oberlin, Peabody, etc.), I began to fully realize the impact I was having on these young people. I remember one of my students out of the original four from that first class I taught asking me if I thought he could make it as a musician. I told him that he absolutely could (and he could—he was good!), and his practicing doubled. He is now a student at the University of Michigan and touring the nation as a jazz musician. Another student from that original class of four asked me for a list of schools to which he should apply. I wrote half a dozen names down on a sheet of paper, and those were the schools to which he applied. He is now student at the Eastman School of Music. The significance of my simple act (offhandedly writing down a bunch of names on a piece of paper) on this student’s future hit me later, and I began to realize the power and responsibility involved with being a teacher.

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The better part of the last decade consisted of me slowly, organically transforming myself from performer to performer/teacher to teacher/performer. I will still always be a performer at heart, but over the years I began to understand the deeper satisfaction that teaching brings to me. The life of a performer, to me, is an inwardly focused and somewhat nerve-wracking lifestyle, while teaching involves an outwardly focused and social lifestyle. This, simply, is a better fit for me, and it is something that took me a good decade to realize.

The life of a performer is and it is, for me and in the particular (long distance) gig sphere which I inhabit, a somewhat destructive and bleak lifestyle. Perhaps things would be different for me if I had landed a position in one of those major orchestras I kept auditioning for, but perhaps not. Endlessly analyzing past decisions is ultimately of limited value, and I now find myself embracing that which I so strenuously avoided during my younger years.

For years I worked as a coach and lesson teacher in the public schools of suburban Chicago. I ran sectionals, did some chamber music coaching, and taught a gaggle of kids during and after the school day. Although I was pretty hesitant about doing this work when I started freelancing, worrying that it would be a massive time sink, I quickly came to enjoy it and I looked forward to the variety that each day of teaching would bring.

I quickly learned that you can be called upon to do ANYTHING in a music department.

I usually got to these schools around 8 a.m., coffee in hand, bleeding from both eyes, feeling the pain of both burning the midnight oil as a freelance bassist and being a schoolteacher in the early mornings. I was always surprised at how great I felt on days when I finally got more than four or five hours of sleep—I had conditioned myself to think of sleep deprived Jason as normal Jason, and I was always amazed to se how all the colors looked brighter, all the smells a little sharper, and all of the days a little more, well… fun than while in my typical bleary haze.

One winter morning a few years back I was walking into the music department in my typical draggy state when I had a series of unpleasant surprises piled upon me.I had arrived a little early, so I unpacked my bass in a rehearsal room and did my usual morning practicing routine, limbering myself up for the long day of teaching and performing that I had ahead of me.

All of a sudden, the fine arts secretary burst into my room, breathless and agitated.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Jason, we’ve got a problem!”she said.“The school is in a drug lockdown state, and Mr. _ (the orchestra director) is stuck over at the planning center. There’s no one else around but you. Can you conduct the orchestra?”

Conduct the orchestra?You’ve got to be kidding me!I had never picked up a baton in my life, and the largest group I had ever rehearsed was a section of bass players.I knew what a four pattern looked like and that sort of thing, having spent my whole life in ensembles, but I had never tried to run a group in my life before.

Not only that, but I would be…. a… substitute teacher!No!Anything but that!

I also had sudden and unpleasant memories of my own high school orchestra experiences, and I remember what a hard time we would always give subs.Every time we saw the name of a sub on the board we orchestra kiddies knew that we had a fun hour ahead of us.I subtly exchanged my bass for my buddy’s cello, and he would just as smoothly swap someone for a violin.Along with instruments, we usually switched names for the day, so I knew that on sub days you could call me Kevin, Kevin would be posing as Dan, and Dan would be posing as Gretchen (hey, that could be a guy’s name, right?).

I was now faced with the unpleasant prospect of not only being a conductor for the day but a substitute teacher to boot.Great.I walked into the orchestra room where 35 squirrelly kids awaited me, smiles on their faces, their beady little eyes checking out their torture victim for the day, bows ready to poke each other and sword fight the moment my head was turned.

The department secretary introduced me.

“Kids, this is Mr. Heath.He will be filling in for Mr. __ for the period as your orchestra director.”

Let the torture begin.

My first task was to get these little rascals tuned up. I could at least do that, right?

“OK, everybody. Play your A strings!” I said.

WAAAAAAAAH…..

A large sustained wave of intonational nastiness filled the room. Hmmmm. By no standard was that a good A. I broke up the sections, trying to point up or down to show individual players which way to turn their pegs.

It got a little better.Not much.

I did the same for each additional string, noticing with dismay that the bass players (my own students, no less) were already off in La-LaLand, poking each other with their bows and laughing like big dumb circus freaks.

“Stop poking me, dude!”

“No, you stop poking me!”

“You’re stupid.”

“No, you’re stupid.”

“Shut up!”

“No, you shut up.”

Ah, high school, just like I remembered it.

My next task was to try to figure what in the heck they were working on. Where were the conductor’s scores? I couldn’t see them anywhere. Finally I opened the concertmaster’s folder, paging through it and trying to figure out what to work on.

I finally found one of the scores on a table by the podium.I can’t for the life of me remember what the piece was, but I do remember that it was fugal, with all of the different sections entering with the theme a few bars after each other.OK—things were going better.I also found a baton on the podium.I had the kids get their music out, raised my arms, and brought the group in.

WAAAH WAAH WAAH

Ah, the lovely strains of the freshman orchestra. Well, good or bad, at least we were moving along.

I cued (and I’m sure my cue was more a wild spasm than a proper cue) the second violins for their entrance, and a few of them came in. OK—good enough. We kept chugging along. Next up were the violas. I cued them in my own special way.

Dead silence.

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Before I go on, I have to admit a terrible, shameful secret: I cannot really tell the difference between a violin and a viola. I know that I have spent most of my life in orchestras, and you’d think that I would be able to see the difference. Heck, I even PLAYED violin for many years when I was younger. Nothing seems to help with my viola identification deficiency, however. I try and try, but nothing works. Even now, I still am not sure when I look at a colleague if they are playing violin or viola.

I can HEAR the difference, mind you, but in the cacophony of a high school orchestra rehearsal (with me, Captain Doofus, at the helm of the ship), who can hear anything? Not me, that’s for sure.

Now, back to our story….

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I started rapping on the podium with my baton (I catch on to conductor tricks quickly!) and brought the group to a halt. I looked over at where I thought the viola section should be. My feeble bass player brain tried to figure out if they were, in fact violas.

No dice. I couldn’t tell. I awkwardly mumbled to them.

“Uh… hey, guys….are you playing the viola part?”

“Uh, YEAH!” one of them angrily shot back. “We’re…..violas!”

Great. Not the sort of thing you want to say to a bunch of high schoolers. If they didn’t think I was an idiot before, they certainly thought from that point on.

I courageously kept up my stick waving, sneaking glances at the wall clock every few minutes, aching for this agony to end.I managed to fill the rest of the period by spouting bunch of mindless drivel about how to play in ensembles.Time seemed to crawl as I kept improvising up there, and I breathed a sigh of relief when the bell finally rang for the next period.

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It was time for me to take off, but the school was still in a DRUG LOCKDOWN state, with dogs sniffing all of the lockers up and down the hallways and outside checking all of the cars in the parking lot.

This kind of police state mentality really gets under my skin. I’ll leave that particular discussion to other folks, but I think that if you treat people like they are criminals then that’s likely to be what you’ll get. Keeping schools secure is important, of course, but this affluent school 25 miles north of Chicago was not exactly a haven of criminal enterprise. Getting kids in their classroom and then springing (surprise!) a DRUG LOCKDOWN on them and keeping them captive in their classrooms while all of their lockers and automobiles are inspected seemed at least a tad paranoid and unnecessary.

To prove the silliness of this kind of procedure, check out what happened next during the DRUG LOCKDOWN.I needed to go—I had a gig—and I was absolutely unwilling to play by their silly drug lockdown rules.What was I going to tell the conductor when I showed up to my gig late?That I was locked in a high school classroom while the drug dogs finished patrolling the 1500 cars in the parking lot?I would absolutely not allow my professionalism to be tarnished by something so trivial.

So I just left. I walked right out the front door past the drug sniffing dogs in the hallways. Near my car I ran into another team of guys with dogs, and I said,

“Uh, I don’t work here.I’ve got to go.”

They said, “Ok.”

And I took off.

What kind of security is that? I had no identification and was parked with all of the students. And while I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I look like a drug dealer, I do have some sort of an unwholesome hippy vibe to my appearance. If the drug enforcement squad were to suspect anybody, why not at least suspect the weird-looking, long-haired hippy guy leaving the school with a BIG BAG and no identification?

I told the orchestra director later that week about the whole incident (my horrific conducting, the “we’re….violas!” comment, and my easy escape from the school), and we both had a good laugh. He agreed—why did they let me go without any fuss at all? What do those DRUG LOCKDOWN states achieve except to let the high schoolers know that Big Brother is watching them at all times and doesn’t trust them, so they’d better look out?

Hey, kids! Big Brother’s coming for your drugs! But don’t worry, you can just slip them to the bass teacher—he always gets away without a scratch.

I played some summer outreach concerts for the Grant Park Music Festival last summer which featured one of my all-time worst verbal gaffes ever. Every once in a while you’ve got to put your foot in your mouth to keep your ego in check, and boy, did I ever put my foot in my mouth on this gig!

I was the only bass player for these events. I’m still not sure why I was asked to play these concerts—I’m not a member of the Grant Park Symphony. The concert was for grade school kids participating in a Chicago Park District summer camp. The camp counselors made the kids wait for lunch until after the concerts, and that combined with the 2 p.m. starting time of these concerts made for audiences of grumpy, impatient little faces.

Part of the concert programs featured a “competition” between the various sections of the orchestra. The segment was called ‘Orchestra Idol’ (after the über-popular TV show), and the woodwinds, brass, percussion, and string sections all had to play a piece, followed by the kids voting for which section they liked the best.

Now, I love stringed instruments as much as the next person, but let’s be realistic for a moment here. There is no way (I mean NO WAY at all) that strings will ever defeat brass in a competition for coolness at the grade school level. It just won’t happen. It’s like rock-paper-scissors. Brass is rock and we strings are scissors, and no matter what we do, rock crushes scissors. We all learned this back in grade school.

The brass section had picked out the theme song to Mission Impossible as their piece, and, to make matters worse, they had recruited a few percussionists to play with them. Brass AND percussion versus strings? Sorry, strings—you’re going down.

The strings had picked an arrangement of Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen as their piece, and while I have always liked this tune (I’m from South Dakota, after all, and we’re always about 25 years behind the times), it is not one that kids these days will probably even recognize. Sure, Wayne’s World re-popularized it in the early 1990s, but these kids weren’t even born then, let alone when it was first released back in the late 1970s.

Things were not looking good for the string section.

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We string players (only two violins, one viola, one cello, and me) worked on the piece with the conductor during the rehearsal, and we all agreed to go backstage and work for another 20 minutes while the woodwinds rehearsed their piece. As we were walking offstage I grumbled to the violist:

“Well, we’re definitely not going to win with this lame-o arrangement.”

One of the violinists heard me and quickly mentioned that she didn’t think it was a bad arrangement.

“Are you kidding?” I said. “It’s terrible!”

It was at that point that I looked at the name of the arranger printed on the music, and I realized to my utter horror that it was the same name as the violist to whom I had just grumbled.

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Nice, Jason. What were those exact words again? We’ll never win with this lame-o arrangement? Great. Very classy.

Once you let out a dumb statement like that, it is pretty much impossible to reel it back in with any grace. What do you say?

“Ooooh… actually, it’s not lame.”

“I meant the other piece we’re playing, not this one.”

“Ha ha… just kidding!”

I decided to just let it hang there, like a big uncomfortable verbal clod. Anything I could say would only make me look spineless. Maybe the violist would RESPECT my forthrightness, my honesty, my lack of sparing anyone’s feelings in expressing my opinion. That’s possible, right?

The worst thing about it was that it wasn’t actually a bad arrangement—I was just venting, annoyed at our imminent defeat at the hands of the brass players. This reinforced a lesson I had learned many times in the past—don’t talk trash for no reason!

We kept rehearsing backstage, and after we got done I lamely said, “You know, I think this arrangement is growing on me! It’s pretty good.”

The violist was not convinced.

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The next day featured our first concert for the kids. You can read about it on an old blog post. I wasn’t brave enough to relay my gaffe the first time I wrote about this event, but that post will give you a synopsis of how the concert went. It was hot out. Very, very hot. We’re talking around 100 degrees Fahrenheit and 100% humidity, out onstage with no air conditioning and no breeze. Very uncomfortable.

The ‘Orchestra Idol’ section of the concert happened, and we sting players did our darndest to impress, bobbing and swaying to the music of Queen. Light applause followed from the hungry and sweaty audience of kids.

The woodwinds went next, playing the theme to The Simpsons, and this received considerably more applause. Woodwinds also don’t have much of a chance against brass and percussion, but at least the kids recognized the tune. The percussion section let loose with their own selection, drawing even more applause.

Finally, it was the brass section’s turn. As they started playing the Mission Impossible theme the kids instantly started cheering. The kids went berserk after the brass finished, clapping and screaming and jumping up and down like a bunch of girls in a Beatles audience.

Stupid brass players with their cool instruments.

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We all know who won, but the conductor decided to rub it in a little. He had the kids vote for the woodwinds first.

“How’d they do?” he asked.

The kids responded with light applause and a few cheers, the polite kind of cheers you give when a popular kid does a bad job in the school play. The “you’re bad, but we love you anyway” kind of cheer.

Next the conductor acknowledged the strings.

“What do you think, kids?” asked he conductor.

The kids started booing!

Booooo! Booooo! Booooo!

We were getting booed by a crowd of 10 year olds. Ouch! It’s like getting booed by puppies.

Finally the brass players were acknowledged. The kids started screaming and cheering hysterically even before the conductor could ask the question.

All of the brass players started laughing at us.

Stupid cocky brass players with their hordes of adoring children.

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We string players decided to revamp our part of the show for the next performance. Maybe we couldn’t win, but we could at least try to avoid getting booed a second time. I didn’t feel so bad ripping on the arrangement after that, seeing as how the 10 year olds also found it to be “lame-o”. We worked up a very cool, slithery Brazilian tune and performed it the next day.

That crowd booed us even more than the first crowd!

Keep in mind, this is an entirely new group of 10 year old campers. What is it with kids booing string players? Why do kids give the woodwinds a pass but jeer at us?

I hate to say it, but multiple audiences of 10 year olds can’t be wrong—strings just aren’t as cool as brass.

Most bassists who don’t hold the principal chair in a major symphony orchestra can count on one had the times that they get to play a solo in orchestra. Double bass is an instrument that does not usually fall into the solo spotlight during your typical orchestra concert, and any occasion to play a significant orchestra solo is therefore memorable.

The Elgin Symphony (of which I am a bass section member) was performing Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite for an upcoming week of concerts. I was chatting with ESO principal bassist Tim Shaffer on another orchestra gig when he mentioned that he wouldn’t be able to play that week in Elgin due to commitments with the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

“The conductor would like you to play the solo,” he said.

This piece contains one of the few significant double bass solos in the orchestral repertoire, and I was excited to get the opportunity to play it. I had done some other orchestral solos in the past, but the opportunity to do it three times in one week for an Elgin Symphony subscription series far surpassed any other such experience of mine.

The week before this subscription series I was playing a wacky program with Present Music of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I had been experimenting with different bass rosins for this contemporary series and had unfortunately gunked my bow hair into a horrifyingly gluey mess. I spent the day before the first rehearsal soaking my bow hair in alcohol, trying to wash the rosin out, comb it out, everything I could think of, but I couldn’t get my gear working right.

I went to the first rehearsal in a panic—a non-working bow is a very bad thing for a string player, and especially so for a string player who will be performing one of the biggest of their solos in the repertoire. Fortunately, one of my many frantic cleaning rituals must have worked, because the bow ended up performing fine.

Rehearsals went well, and so did the concerts. On two of the performances the applause from the audience erupted in cheers when the conductor acknowledged me.

The paper the next morning had a review. I opened the Arts section, interested to see what the critic had written. He mentioned the bass player! The critic had written:

The Stravinsky Pulcinella Suite featured the excellent bass playing of principal bassist Tim Shaffer….

Aw, man! My one big moment. The odds of a section player getting another chance to play another such solo in another orchestra like this AND have the newspaper critic mention the bass soloist are, to say the least, quite low.

I called Tim up later that day.

“I heard you played a great solo!” I said.

“Yeah, it went so well, I can hardly remember it,” he slyly retorted.

At least one of his students called him up to congratulate him on the mention in the paper.

I almost called the paper to tell them that their reviewer was in error—the bass solo was actually played by Joe Guastefeste that night (Joe is the principal bass of the Chicago Symphony). That would have been a “correction” worth submitting!

This is the worst gig story ever.

I’ve told a lot of gig stories on this blog. Some of them are humorous, some are annoying or cringe-worthy, but none even come close to this one. This is the sort of surreal tale that you might see in the movies, but it actually happened to me.

Ever since high school, I had driven old hand-me-down cars from my parents. Typically, these were decent cars with a lot of mileage on them (my dad worked 65 miles out of town at the time), and I drove them until they started to fall apart. At that point they were passed along to my little brother (who would have wrecked them anyway), and I got the next one in line.

This pattern continued through college and beyond into the first few years of my freelance career. As I got on more solid financial footing in my career I knew it would soon be time for a new car of my own. The ever increasing odometer on my hand-me-down Subaru (200,000 miles, 210,000, 220,000…..) made me see the writing on the wall, and I knew I would be paying a visit to a dealership soon.

The big question for me was what kind of car to get. I really liked Subarus, but a new Outback or Forester was well out of my freelance bassist budget. My fiancée had just bought a zippy little Saturn wagon, and I had borrowed it several times while my Subaru was in the shop. It seemed like a reasonably priced and solid bassmobile. When my trusty Subaru finally fell apart at 250,000 miles I drove it (with no power steering and questionable brakes) to the nearest Saturn dealership. I bought the same exact car that my fiancée had.

That was, without a doubt, the biggest mistake I’ve ever made.

February 11, 2004

10:20 p.m.

I had just hit 40,000 miles in my one year old new silver Saturn wagon. I loved this zippy little wagon. It was reliable, easy on the gas, and plenty roomy. I had just played a rehearsal with the Northwest Indiana Symphony in a little town called Merillville, about 20 miles south of Gary. Merillville is a destination city for Northwest Indiana, and it is a marked contrast to the heavy industry of the Garry/Hammond area (my friends in college used to call that area Hell, U.S.A.), and the blight of the south side of Chicago. It was about 65 miles away from my place in Evanston.

This February night was cold. Really cold. A bubble of Arctic air had engulfed Chicagoland that week, and the air temperature was hovering in the single digits, with the wind chill dropping well below zero.

Shivering, I loaded my bass up into my Saturn, started it up, and headed for the tollway, eager to get back to Evanston and my nice, warm home.

As I pulled onto the tollway, I noticed that the ‘check engine’ light had just appeared on my dashboard. I scowled. This was the first time that any light had come on my dash, and I was annoyed that the perfect streak I had been having thus far with my Saturn was ending.

It sure was ending. I had no idea how badly it was ending.

In hindsight, I wonder why I didn’t just immediately pull my car off the road when that ‘check engine’ light came on. That would certainly have made for a much better evening, but ask yourself what you would have done? Does a check engine light mean “imminent death”? Don’t people drive all the time with ‘check engine’ lights on?

Well, they shouldn’t in Saturns—I can tell you that for sure.

I continued driving down the highway, and I noticed that my car was feeling a little unresponsive. It would do what I wanted it to do, but just a… little… slower…. than…. usual. Did it have to do with the ‘check engine’ light problem? The cold? The wind?

All of a sudden there was a huge BANG from under the car and a big roaring engine sound, like a motorcycle driving with no muffler.

My scowl turned to a look of confusion and worry. My muffler had just blown a hole in it in the industrial wasteland between Gary and East Chicago on the coldest night of the winter.

Or so I thought. If only it had been that.

I was now driving home with a ‘check engine’ light on and a blown muffler. Not the way I had been planning the night to go, certainly, but not life-threatening by any means.

Hindsight again makes me wonder what would have happened if I had stopped at that point. What exactly had happened at that point? What was that bang? Authorities later could never tell me for certain, because all the evidence would be incinerated in the coming minutes.

At this point my focus was just on getting to the Saturn dealership located a few miles from my place in Evanston. I was on the south side of Chicago when the bang occurred, and all I had to do was to get another fifteen or twenty miles north. Again, this may have seemed foolish to the future observer, but think about the mental process I was going through at that moment. Pull over at 95th street in Chicago at 11:00 p.m. when it is well below freezing and call a tow truck to take me twenty miles north? Dump my car in a south side lot to get repaired in the morning? My timid Evanstonian self wasn’t too into that idea. After all, how bad could a blown muffler be? People passed me with blown mufflers all the time on the highway. It must not be that dangerous to keep driving, right?

So I kept driving. As I approached the south end of downtown I decided to take the express lanes from the Dan-Ryan Expressway to the Kennedy Expressway.

This spur between the expressways has two lanes and no shoulder.

As I made my move onto the express lanes I started smelling smoke. I looked and saw dirty grey-black smoke coming out of the vents in my car. Alarmed, I looked at the engine temperature. It was completely normal. What was going on?

My car was now up on the elevated express lane spur to the Kennedy Expressway. A frigid Chinatown was below me.

I started to feel some heat behind me. I turned around.

My back seat was on fire!

Let me say that again.

My BACK SEAT was on FIRE!!!

At first I wondered why there was this weird orange glow coming from behind me. My brain at first couldn’t reconcile the sight of flames inside of my nice new car.

fire…. car…. fire… car… FIRE?!? CAR?!?!?

I had to get out of there! I pulled my car over as far as I could (no shoulder, remember?) and jumped out. The flames were lapping at the neck of my bass and spreading into the front seat. What should I do? What did I need? My phone! I needed my phone. I knew that. People needed to be told that my car was on fire. My bass! My bass was on fire! AAH! I opened the tailgate and pulled my bass out of the building inferno and into the single digit cold of the expressway.

I ran around to the passenger seat of the car. Where was my phone? I needed it! It was on the passenger seat, which was now very much on fire. I grabbed it, avoiding the flames, plus some other random stuff like:

-A book on tape set from the Evanston Public Library (minus the tape still in the player of the car)

-my novel (I may have some time to kill, right? Maybe I could get some good reading done)

-the Chicago Reader (the free weekly Chicago paper)

I ran back behind the car, making sure to lock it first (gotta keep the highway thieves out of my inferno car, right?), grabbed my bass (minus my bass wheel, which was still inside the car), and started sprinting down the highway and screaming.

Stepping outside of myself that night, I can imagine the bizarre sight I must have made to the observers in the long line of cars that I had gridlocked (2 lanes, no shoulder, remember?) with my flaming car. People must have been bewildered by the sight of a station wagon in a flaming inferno and a man running and screaming while also carrying a double bass.

This was the moment in my life when I decided that freelance music was not the life for me.

I got a few hundred feet away and called 911:

“My car’s on fire! Aaaargh! Fire! Fire!”

“Calm down, sir. Where are you?”

“I’m above Chinatown! Fire!”

“Sir, please explain where you are.”

“Freeway! Fire! Aargh!”

They found me anyway. Perhaps the giant torch of a car and massive resulting gridlock were a hint.

Then I decided to call my parents:

“Aaargh! My car’s on fire! Everything’s burning! I’ve got to go!”

Click.

That must have been a restful late night call for my parents.

Then I called my fiancée. Yet another hysterical conversation from me, with her trying to get me to explain exactly where I was and what was going on. She somehow got the information out of me, and she headed out to come find me.

I realized that, although I had gotten a few hundred feet away, I didn’t know what constituted a safe distance from a burning car. They don’t tell you the safe burning car distance when you buy a car at the Saturn dealer. I chugged down the expressway a little more just to be safe.

I had just cleared out of there and turned around to face the car when the gas tank blew.

My own intimate experience with car explosions leads me to believe that Hollywood exaggerates a bit when they portray car explosions in the movies. Parts didn’t fly everywhere, and I wasn’t blown backward. There was a fire, a boom, and then a much bigger fire.

The most surreal moment of the night came after that. Saturn auto bodies are made mostly out of plastic, and I saw the exterior of my car melt off of the metal frame like ice cream on a hot summer day. Like lava, the melted exterior formed a rivulet of hot molten plastic and ran down the expressway next to me. I watched it, covered in soot, holding my bass, novel, and Chicago Reader, watching the scene unfold with an almost Zen-like serenity. I had entered a state of calm (i.e. shock) and was simply interested in the events around me, forgetting momentarily that I was the main character in this drama.

Two fire trucks and five police cruisers eventually made their way to me. The fire trucks hosed down the smoldering husk of my former car as the police searched me for weapons.

Hands on the hood of the police cruiser, bass on the ground next to me, the vast crowd of automobiles lined up behind me, I had the realization that maybe Saturns weren’t so reliable after all.

After searching me, I had the bizarre task of describing to the policemen how to load my bass into one of their cruisers. One of them didn’t have the protective divider between the front and back seat, and we proceeded to figure out how to best recline the front seat and wedge in my bass.

“Just a little more back…now go left….that’s it…no, wait, let’s angle it this way…”

My car was now not on fire anymore. A tow truck arrived, hitched it up, and started to pull it away. All four of my tires immediately fell off in chunks, as did my license plates. All of my windows were gone, and the interior was nothing but charred blackened crust on the metal frame of my former car.

“Do you need anything out of the vehicle, sir?” asked one of the officers.

I declined. I needed a whole bunch of stuff in there (to this day I look for a piece of music or a CD, only to realize that it was in the car when it exploded), but I had absolutely no desire to get a closer view of the wreckage.

The cops waited with me as my fiancée arrived, and she and I loaded up my bass into the back of her car (her car was a duplicate of mine, remember?) and helped me into the front seat.

I was covered with soot and smelled so badly of burnt plastic that despite the Arctic temperature we had to keep the windows open as we made our way home.

We bagged my jacket, pants and shirt in double and triple plastic bags, but the smell was still overwhelming. I was covered in grime and had a hard time seeing and breathing, but I took a shower and hoped that I’d be OK (no health insurance—freelance musician, remember?).

Traumatizing? You’d better believe it. I get nauseous whenever I pass the spot on the freeway where it happened (for years I would take other routes to avoid that memorable spot).