Tune Up Your Strad, Brad!

Fiddling Around in the Big Apple...

Disappointment loomed. I sensed it. I had been through this before, in a past life.

We were at New York City’s Lincoln Center to hear Isaac Stern, Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman - three of the greatest violinists in the world – together in concert with the New York Philharmonic.

It was the event everyone had been waiting for.

But when the manager trudged onstage several minutes late, he did not look happy. It seemed the truck with the orchestra’s instruments was stuck in a traffic jam in the Lincoln Tunnel or some other tunnel, and it would be another couple of hours before it arrived and got unloaded.

I knew how this sort of thing went, and it wasn’t going to be pretty. I had grown up in Indianapolis, where entertainment attractions often failed to match our expectations. Below average concerts where the drummer skips a beat and checks his wristwatch to see how much longer he has to play.

But let us leave New York and the Fiddlers Three for just a moment. We will return to them shortly.

Let’s travel back in time to 1969, when I attended a Jimi Hendrix concert at the Indiana State Fairgrounds Coliseum. I was there to review the show, but ended up just foaming at the mouth in a blistering rant.

“A starving man will grab at anything that resembles food,” I related in my review in the next day’s paper. The audience, I said, was given only a “morsel of entertainment and left hungry.”

Ignore my sophomoric food metaphor, but I’ll just say that my printed account trashed the show, calling the venue “an acoustical nightmare suitable only for livestock expositions.”

Please understand, I have nothing against livestock.

Hendrix, who seemed appalled by the sound quality, played only a few songs, which didn’t even include “Purple Haze.” He left the stage abruptly and did not return.

As for me, I had finally reached my limit. I was pretty tired of going to concerts and wondering what it would be like to hear them someplace where they had higher standards. Or, you know, at least any standards at all.  

My hometown was no performer’s dream, let’s face it. And if the visiting talent didn’t knock themselves out entertaining us, I must play fair and admit my city didn’t always welcome them with open arms.

The city’s attitude could sometimes be boiled down to, “What the hell are you doing here?”

When the Beatles had played the Fairgrounds, in 1964, Indiana’s Governor was given 100 tickets for his personal use, but he famously returned them. He said he didn’t want to see the concert, and he didn’t know anybody else who did.  

Remember, that was the Beatles.

The Indianapolis News actually held a competition, with a U.S. Savings Bond for a prize, for the winning composition. Fifty words or less, “Why I Don’t Want to Meet the Beatles.” I won’t insult you by printing the winning essay.

I’m going to insert a little-known fact. Elvis Presley gave his very last concert here,      June 27, 1977. Less than two months later, he was dead. I can’t find a way to blame Indianapolis for this, but give me time.

As a teenager, I reckoned there had to be a better place for experiencing the arts, and I guessed it would be New York City.

If you are expecting this to be a story about some guy who leaves his home in the sticks and then learns that the big city isn’t all it was cracked up to be, you should stop reading. My eight years living in Manhattan popped and sparkled with show-stopping moments and razzle-dazzle experiences I would never, ever, forget.

Before we even moved to New York, we were just visiting for a few days, and we read that Eugene O’Neil’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night” had been revived. A couple of days later we were actually watching two celebrated stars, Robert Ryan and Geraldine Fitzgerald, perform it live, right in front of us. .

It was my first Broadway play. I was hooked. It was easy - you just bought tickets, showed up and got incredibly entertained, just like that, because this was New York.

It only got better. One unforgettable night we attended Stephen Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music.” We knew little about the play and nothing about its songs.

With absolutely no expectations, we sat in a theater and heard a new song called, “Send in the Clowns,” sung by Glynis Johns, for whom Sondheim had written it. It came as a total surprise, which only made it all the more stunning.

That’s what they call a show-stopper.

You just don’t know what you’re going to find in New York. There is a video clip I love, from Madison Square Garden, in which Taylor Swift says she’s going to sing  “Fire and Rain,” and she tells an adoring audience that she was actually named after the song’s author, James Taylor.

Then, James Taylor himself walks onstage with his guitar and does a duet with Swift. I mean, I ask you, where else would this happen?

Excuse me, I seem to have lost my original thread here. Let’s get back to Lincoln Center, where this story began. We were about to hear a guy in a tuxedo tell us the concert was cancelled.

But he didn’t do that.

Instead, the tuxedo man told us that Isaac Stern, Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman were in the house, along with their Stradivarius violins, and that they would be delighted to entertain us by themselves until the orchestra’s instruments arrived.

And that’s just what they did. Three violin virtuosos, blazing through Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons.” Not just spring or summer, but every season.

Because, you know, New York City.