We attended our cousin’s high school graduation in Texas the other night—virtually, of course. It was quite a sight as her class of 623, all masked and socially distant, paraded through a football stadium and were issued their diplomas in a ceremony that went on all evening. I suggested to her parents that it might have been quicker to just give a souvenir to everyone who wasn’t graduating, but that was just me being a troublemaker. 

Our cousin was the class’s salutatorian and gave an inspiring speech to her 622 classmates. We were home watching it all on TV, so she didn’t have to worry about me embarrassing her on her big night. It’s enough that she has to endure the dual burden of being both brilliant and beautiful. 

 My own graduating class had 90 members back in 1958. It was described as an “experimental school,” which helps explain how I somehow got a diploma despite never having passed algebra, geometry, chemistry or anything else else considered useful then or now. But that’s another story. 

Meanwhile, in Texas, hey closed the ceremony with a climactic playing of the school’s new fight song. For many years it had been “Dixie,” a song with a troubled portfolio, and the school’s students and faculty had the good sense to get rid of it and commission a new fight song without the baggage. The performance of the new song triggered a response in me, but not the one you might expect. 

I graduated from University High School in Bloomington, Indiana. Our fight song used the melody of the Ohio State song, a place that certainly knows something about fighting. For the Univees, the lyric became: 

Okay, cool, I still remember it, but… 

Following the class of 1972’s graduation, there was no more University High School. It was deleted, terminated, obliterated. It’s passed on! It is no more! 

It has ceased to be! It’s expired and gone to meet its maker! It’s a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace, pushing up the daisies! Its metabolic processes are cancelled. It's shuffled off its mortal coil It’s an EX-SCHOOL. It's moved to the other side of town, and its name changed to Bloomington High School North, which just further underscores the fact that it has legally ceased to exist. 

So obviously I had to rewrite the lyrics, beginning with the first line: “University, let’s win that old ball game tonight…” 

Of course there will be no ball game tonight, or any other night for that matter, since U-School had evolved to a plane of non-existence and joined the bleeding choir invisible. 

“We’ll cheer you on to victory and make them fear the red and white…” 

Putting aside the moral dilemma of whether it is an entirely appropriate goal to seek to instill fear in the general public of two innocent ordinary colors, it was felt that in any case, there was little likelihood of achieving such a goal. 

“UHS, we know you can win…” 

Well, we know nothing of the sort anymore, do we? 

And we didn’t then, either. If the lyric had read “UHS, we know you might at least look good and perhaps surpass expectations,” it might have been a more accurate statement. 

“And we’ll back those Univee men…” 

Clearly, a relic from a different and clearly sexist era. 

So a decision was made to rewrite the lyrics in toto. However, Toto happened to be on tour in Japan at the time, and therefore unavailable, so the task was handed to a nameless, blameless and shameless alumnus from the class of 1958, commonly know as, well, me. 

The lyrics were problematic enough, but the music also had to be rethought. If not, I might expect receive a letter from a legal firm representing a nearby Big Ten school, albeit a mediocre one, asserting: 

“This musical material has been found to be substantially plagiarized from the well-known song generally known and associated with The Ohio State University. Any further attempts to denigrate and besmirch this composition by associating it with a secondary school, and a non-existent one at that, will result in swift and brutal litigation.” 

Eventually, after more work than I ever did while in high school, I was able to fashion a brand new, unassailable fight song for NOW—up-to-date, yet nostalgic; a song with a great sense of joie de merde, with an infectious ailment that all could share. 

Here are the words of my fight song: 

ALMA MATER MORTIS 

University, you no longer need to win that old ball game. 

We no longer fight for the red and white, 'cause tonight it’s not the same. 

There is no more Jordannus, the jazz club is defunct. 

The faculty can’t remember whom they passed and who they flunked. 

The building may be standing down where Jordan crosses Third, 

but there are no pants up the flagpole, 

and “eat a big one”’s never heard. 

chorus: 

The Univee is history, we’re stiffer than geology, 

but alma mater mortis, you will always be “U” to me. 

They have emptied out all our lockers now and cleaned up all our messes. 

The rec room’s lost its rectum, the Quad has stopped the presses. 

The study hall is finally silent, but no books are being read. 

There’s no interest in the principal and driver’s ed is dead. 

The cafeteria’s empty and the Chatterbox is gone, 

so a lot of salmonella must go somewhere else to spawn. 

The Univee is history, we’re flatter than geography, 

but alma mater mortis, you will always be “U” to me. 

The Univee is history, we’re guinea pig biology, 

but alma mater mortis, you will always be “U” to me, see? 

Alma mater mortis, you will always be “U” to me. 

I recorded a version of it, performed by the “All Univee Alumni Marching  Band,” so-called because I played all the parts, and I officially remain an alumnus. If you feel courageous, feel free to sing along with the track below…

But you can disregard those other options at the bottom. That's just junk my web provider insists on adding for its own reasons. I haven't figured out how to make them go away.

We were wrapping up our regular Saturday morning breakfast Zoom meeting (“Marie Callendar’s in Exile”) today when the news about Fred Willard’s passing came through. 

I’ve had complaints about the number of dead people who’ve appeared in my blogs lately, so I’m trying to focus on the live ones I know, but I gotta put that on hold, because Fred was special. 

I thought back to January 30, 1975, when we put together an all-star concert at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre. The lineup included the band I was producing, the Roto Rooter Good Time Christmas Band, my old college pal The Trumpeting Fool, Doctor Demento, and the Ace Trucking Company (pictured). 

I don’t remember how we able to snag the Ace Trucking Company. It was early in their career, but they were already great, especially Fred Willard. The show, of course, was a financial disaster, for a number of reasons that have long since passed their statute of limitations. But I claim it was a creative blockbuster, and no one is going to tell me different. 

I reminded Fred about that performance when I saw him at an event at the Gene Autry Museum a while ago. He didn’t remember the event as fondly as I did—it was clearly not a career highlight for him, but for others of us it had aged more pleasantly. 

I last ran into Fred after a Hollywood Bowl show by Weird Al Yankovic in 2016, when we, along with Fred and his wife Mary, were waiting to get on the after-show shuttle to the handicapped parking lot. We chatted during the ride, and I made sure not to mention the Wilshire Ebell evening, instead chatting happily about how much we’d enjoyed Weird Al’s show. Like Fred, Weird Al always delivered the goods. 

Fred’s appearances in the Christopher Guest documentary films were always best in show, especially in Best in Show. More recently Jimmy Kimmel, whose judgment is dependable, hired Fred to do a lot of hilarious sketch appearances on his show, simultaneously classing up the Kimmel show and keeping Fred busy. 

RIP Fred Willard, you were loved by many.

In the mid 1960s, my wife and I started a store in Brown County, Indiana. It was called the One of a Kind Shop, and our business plan was to buy cheap junk in second-hand stores, tote it home, fix it up a little bit, and sell it for much more money to antique collectors. 

It was, for me, a time of many goofy business ventures. I started a movie theater, also in Brown County, called the Nashville Nickelodeon. It showed old-time silent movies, for which I played piano, giving me an item on my resume not generally shared by piano players in the 1960s. 

At the same time, I started a tourist magazine called The Brown County Almanack. Last I heard, the Almanack was still being published, after it was picked up by the local weekly newspaper. 

In my spare time, I wrote jingles, and at night I had the house band in a night club in Indianapolis. More stories for later.

This didn’t leave much time for sleep, especially when I started playing the Jim Gerard TV show in the mornings. So we moved to Indianapolis, and that’s yet another story, which I’ll mercifully skip for now. 

At some point we figured things out and moved to Los Angeles. I’ll also skip the paragraphs describing that move for another time, how I started getting some work, and somehow bought a house. 

I’ll pick up my account in the early 1970s when, as part of our quest to fill every cubic cubbyhole of that house with whimsically ironic effluvia, my wife and I started making the rounds of flea markets in the Los Angeles area. The most productive one was the frighteningly enormous Rose Bowl Swap Meet and Flea Market, where we dropped a lot of spare loot on egregious gewgaws from many eras. That is also where I first encountered the Roto Rooter Good Time Christmas Band, which is the story I’ve taken a very roundabout way to get to today. Here, halfway through this endless blog entry is, finally, how it happened: 

As I rounded a corner near an exit from the Rose Bowl, the Rooters were just cranking up what they called the Buick LeSabre Dance. That peppy number was segued omtp their version of most of the score from "The Wizard of Oz." 

I stood mesmerized for 45 minutes as they ran through a typically all-encompassing set—the most compelling blend of the virtuoso and the inept I had encountered since hearing Thelonious Monk on a rough night. When the RRGTCB finished playing, I uncharacteristically introduced myself as a big-shot Hollywood type who could get them a record deal. 

This was nonsense, of course—but not totally fictional, as it turned out. I did get them a record deal, albeit one with Vanguard Records, a small New York label for whom I had done an album ("The Masters Of Deceit”—I’ve mentioned it before, but don't bother to look for it) in the 1960s. I was somehow still on speaking terms with Vanguard’s president, Maynard Solomon, and I was fully aware that he was a Beethoven scholar and wouldn't be able to resist any band that did the Fifth Symphony with choreography. 

Eventually, the Vanguard album was recorded at the fully professional MRI studios in Hollywood, and the label even paid me a small stipend for my services as producer—although those funds promptly went to fund the bailing out of a band member who had been arrested on the eve of the first recording session. 

The album was a critical success but a marketing flop. Vanguard was never known as a label which promoted its artists heavily, and sometimes it seemed that their publicity department was under a non-disclosure agreement. Potential album buyers assumed the Roto Rooter Good Time Christmas Band was either (a) a corporate performing unit of a drain-cleaning company, (b) yet another album of Christmas Carols or (c) something left behind by space aliens. Mostly true, but in any event, the mass market left it alone. 

I did mention the album to an old friend and fellow Vanguard artist, Peter Schickele (AKA ”P.D.Q. Bach"), and he phoned Maynard Solomon to ask the label to ship him a copy. Solomon replied: "Sure. Would you like 500?" At that moment, we realized that Vanguard was not counting on Roto Rooter for boffo sales. 

The album eventually made the gradual transition from New Release to featured album to Discount Item to Collector's Rarity, with mint-condition copies now selling for more money than the band members made from it. 

A few years ago, the Lawrence Welk Organization counted its money (“A one and a two”) and found it had enough to buy Vanguard Records. When I heard about this, I called the Welk offices and inquired about the Roto Rooter album, whether it might be possible to reacquire it or something. I was told that no, there were no plans to reissue it on CD; and no, they weren't interested in allowing the band to reissue it either. "We don't do that," sniffed a Welkster. Perhaps Lawrence had issued an edict from the grave, condemning this band because he was still pissed off about Roto Rooter’s notable melding of genres between ”Bubbles In The Wine" with "21st Century Schizoid Man." 

For many years, the Vanguard album remained a vinyl-only rarity, meaning that digital listeners were deprived of the joy of hearing me walk around the studio (during "The Rite of Spring") swinging a long plastic tube into which I was chanting "Roto Rooter Roto Rooter Roto Rooter" to Stravinsky’s catchy melody. 

The Roto Rooter Good Time Chrismas Band achieved the difficult feat of being simultaneously behind the times and ahead of its time. 

The cover of the LP was quite stunning in its own stunned way, as you can see above, but at the right I’m also showing you a previously unseen alternate version of the cover, with an in-person appearance by the album’s producer, a then-young man who turned out to be, if can you believe it…me.

I love technology almost as much as I hate technology. Even thought it wasn't really necessary, we kept up with all the latest tools of our touring trade. We were one of the first bands to use in-ear monitoring, doing away with the monitor speakers that have robbed so many veteran musicians of a portion of their hearing. (Thank you to our audio man Stan Miller, for making us digital before some of us knew what that meant, and saving our ears.) 

Alan Lindgren, Larry Brown and I made what was arguably the first album that was recorded direct from sequencers and samplers to CD, without an analog step in the middle. We were proud of that back then, but the way things have developed over the years, our pride is considerably diminished. That feeling is expressed in the version of "Headed for the Future" on the 2017 Jazz Time album. 

We used lasers before lasers were cool, and used them a lot less when not using them was even more cool—but thank you to Wacky Ed Auswacks for being our laser pointer. And we did a few projects with him during our off times. We actually won an award caled the THEA award, some kind of themed entertainment deal. We weren't too impressed about it, until I went a screening at the Disney studios in Burbank, and found that they had their THEA award displayed in a case withj a spotlight on it, so I may have to dig that object of the archives and display it someplace in the house.

On another techno-front: The Diamondville web page was created in 1996, before most sane people used the internet, and before we could even spell HTML. You can still see that original site today, so If you're so inclined, use this link. But don't follow the links you'll on that creaky old page, because they're pretty antiquated these 24 years later.

Oh, and the more recent Diamondville page is still up, although it's frozen in time beginning around 2011. It's at Diamondville.com, right where you'd expect it. If you do visit that one, you'll find a proto-blog called Diamondville Doings, which you might want to click on, because some of it is still reasonably funny, at least if you're as perverse as I am.

You may have noticed I've had this site shut down for a week or so--I was attempting to move it to a new platform, because I found the Bandzoogle setup to be restrictive and craved a more creator-friendly means of working, but it became too much work, frankly, for what is now more of a hobby for me. So I settled for spending a little more time trying to learn how to do this site the way Bandzoogle wants me to do it, rather than the way I want to do it. And it's not so bad, I guess.

A couple of organizational things I should explain: the Tom Sez page, this one, is going to be about miscellaneous stuff that crosses my mind, while a second blog I added, The Diamondville Chronicles, is for tour-related stories, for a book I'm hoping to assemble about that particular part of my history. I'll probably get tied up trying to decide what goes where, but maybe, just maybe, it'll be a little more efficient to read. Hell, I don't know. I'm just headed for the future, even if I have to go to the past to find it.