should I stay or should I go, late to the topic

[Pianofxrguy@aol.com]

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This thread may be over and maybe this story is a bit too long,  but....
 
    I was attending an outdoor music festival years  ago, (I was going to 
accompany a folk singer), and the promoters had a piano due  to be delivered by 
the time the headliner was going to play (Andre Crouch.) Mr.  Crouch and his 
entourage arrived and still no piano. A member of the audience  drove his pickup 
home and brought the spinet from his living room. They asked me  to tune it 
up quickly as start time for the performance had come and gone. 
    I checked the pitch and it was almost a whole step  flat. While I was on 
stage starting to tune in front of a baseball field full of  people, the 
promoters put on a husband/wife gospel duet to perform for the crowd  while I tuned 
8 feet away. I had my head stuck inside the piano within inches of  the 
strings concentrating hard to hear what I was doing, and a guy sat down on  the 
bench and said he had tuned a piano once and if it would help he would tune  the 
the top half of the piano while I tuned the bottom half. I told him that I  
was afraid that that wouldn't help.  He decided to stay and chat while I  tuned, 
though.
    I wrestled it up to 1/2 step flat and went to  consult with Mr. Crouch in 
his traveling bus (the biggest and coolest I had seen  at that time). I told 
him that it was kind of in tune with itself at a 1/2 step  below concert pitch 
and that I could maybe bring it up and make it presentable  in another hour. 
He consulted with his band, and they thought they could retune  or transpose 
to accommodate the key change, so they would go ahead with it the  way it was. 
( The trumpet player had a little brass loop that he put  between the 
mouthpiece and the horn to lower pitch exactly 1/2 step. Never saw  that before.)
    They went on and performed for almost 2 hours and  although I felt pretty 
awful the piano sounded only somewhat out of tune with  some shaky unisons 
and octaves.  The crowd enjoyed the performance and I  was completely knocked 
out by the musicianship of the group, being able to  perform their repertoire by 
transposing on the fly or playing detuned  instruments.
    I went up afterward to apologize for not being able  to get the piano 
sounding better, and he was very gracious and appreciative of  the effort I had 
made. What a classy guy.
    Hope nothing like that ever happens again,
        John Stroup
 

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