Dave Wood

One of the things I’m reminiscing about while I’m lolling in my recuperation abode is getting together with my old band buddies and having a great time while playing ridiculously bad music. We were called The Better Than Nothing Dirt Band.

How bad could we be, you might wonder, when our members were a pretty classy group that included a bank vice president, a professional speech writer, an ATT executive, an actual music teacher (our trumpeter), a college professor (that would be me!) and a guy who continued playing professionally with the Mouldy Figs after our group broke up?

Bad enough to get chosen to be featured in a film about a really bad band. This is how it happened: We were approached by a corporate executive in charge of making a motivational film for his company, one of those films that urge employees on to do better things. “We would like you,” the executive explained, “to provide music for our movie. If you do, we’ll give lots of money to your favorite charity.”

Well now. Was this guy on the level, asking us to be in a movie that would be seen by thousands of his company’s employees? After all, there are hundreds of unemployed professional musicians who are dying for work. And they can play.

So we asked him if he had lost his senses or if his psychiatrist ever told him that he had suicidal impulses. Not at all, said the executive. “You’ll provide the music for the band when it’s playing the dumb, old-fashioned music. Later, the band will catch on to the new music and they’ll succeed in getting respect for their performance, and our employees will learn from that to deal with new technologies.”

The offer was sort of insulting, but we were used to that, so we trotted off to the studio to cut the soundtrack, helped by all manner of fancy technicians and sound mixers. We played stuff like our theme song, “Rhapsody in Liechtenstein,” which starts with a clarinet glissando from “Rhapsody in Blue” and segues into “Liechtensteiner Polka.” As usual, we were terrible, and the executive seemed very pleased.

So when the recording session was over, we asked when we should show up for the filming of the movie.

“Oh,” said he, “We’re hiring actors to play your roles. Your job is finished. We’ll take what we can use from this recording session, and we’ll plug it into movie footage in which there’s a bunch of actors pretending to play polkas and waltzes on instruments they don’t know how to play.”

In case you don’t get my drift, let me recap: The Better Than Nothing Dirt Band plays so badly that we were tapped from all the musicians in Minneapolis to play music so bad that no one wanted to listen to it. That was the unkindest cut, to quote another writer.

To make matters worse, when we left the studio, the executive asked if he could rent my tuba for the filming. It was a 1947 Conn model with more dents in it than Evel Knievel’s skull.

So I said, “Sure, for 100 bucks,” and the executive pulled out a hundred dollar bill, which I decided I might use for some spiffier clothes or maybe a salon haircut.  

Right now, neither of those options would help conceal my banged up head, but remembering the good times I had with my fellow bad musicians is helping me hold up my head when this neck brace isn’t quite doing its job.