1. family funeral band
transcript
There are families who play music together. I know this because that’s my family. And there are people who get up and play music at funerals. I know this because my family are those people. We are a family funeral band.
But we didn’t just fall into it. We were nudged into it, by one person in particular.
DAD: “Well the thing with a memorial is that’s it. You’re not going to have another one. I mean you can blow a birthday or even blow a wedding. Many people come back and get married again.
My dad. The man who carried around a briefcase of harmonicas; who drove me to guitar practice every Wednesday, who told everyone I was his “house band.”
DAD: “If you’re not 15 minutes early, you’re late. And so that- I would probably show up half an hour early even if it was a little event.
And take my word for it, I resented the band at times, as did my mom. I pretended to be sick or tired and skipped practice. But that was a while ago and I no longer hold it against him. What I’m really interested in, now, is figuring out why my dad did it. Why funerals?
So I dug up the old audio cassettes, and went back to the most important deaths, looking for any clues I could find.
MOM: “Where did it all begin? The first funeral I remember is Johnny’s.”
You could say it all begins with Johnnie. Johnnie was physically and verbally abused as a kid. He was my dad’s older cousin and they were close. When Johnnie turned 18, he disappeared into the ether
Word had it that Johnnie was addicted to heroin. Years passed. And then just like like, Johnny reentered my dad’s life.
DAD: “I went out to one of the first fiddler conventions, and I got out there kind of early. And I saw a guy- and at that point I didn’t know where Johnnie was living- and I saw a guy dumpster diving for food, and I took a closer look and it was my cousin Johnnie. And then we ended up spending the day together. I told Johnnie at one point, rather than beating yourself up, if you need a new family, make a new family. We’ll be your new family if you need a new family.”
My dad was building a studio next to our house. He let Johnnie move in and loaned him money to get a taxi medallion, which Johnnie thought would be a good job. The taxi job fell through, but Johnnie stayed in the studio. Here’s my mom.
MOM: “And then I think alcohol started disappearing in the house. Also, you were a young baby, at the time here, and Dad could be gone for a long time at work, and then it would be you and I and Johnnie and I had just come out of a relationship where I was dealing with somebody like that... And he had that, I don’t know how to say it, this jive, the lying, the part that I had been dealing with for so long with somebody who had that kind of addiction and it just triggered off things for me.”
My mom had dated an addict not so long ago and my dad asked Johnnie to leave. He was gone a few years, but when he came back next time, he really seemed sober.
He had friends, a mentor, a place to live. He stayed that way for a couple of years. He was doing well. And then what seemed inevitable happened, he relapsed.
DAD: “When you hit rock-bottom, and then you start to recover, even though that was your rock bottom, if you fall, you fall to an even deeper place. Right around his 50th birthday...”
MOM: “...he went up to Big Sur, which is one of his favorite places, and got his sleeping bag, and was sleeping outside with the stars, and took something and put a plastic bag over his head, like some sort of barbiturate or something, and put a plastic bag over his head and just drifted off...
“It was hard for dad. Ironically we might have been out in his studio when he told me. You know, he didn’t want me to do too much with him, hugging him or consoling him. He just needed to have that private moment to cry. Oh, he was really devastated. He was just so sad. I mean he, you know, he really loved, you know, his cousins, and he really liked Johnnie a lot, and like I said, he tried to help him out in whatever way he could, and it was just so sad to see his life end that way.”
My dad asked Johnnie’s mother if they were going to have a funeral and she accused Johnnie of taking his own life just to get back at her, presumably because of all the abuse.. So my dad picked some songs, wrote a eulogy, and put on the funeral himself.
DAD (from recording of funeral): “I guess I’m the MC (audience laughter). I’m really glad to see so many of my cousins together here.”
On the day of Johnny's funeral, not one member of his immediate family showed up.
DAD (from funeral): “Chat, rap, talk, spinning the yarn, that was Johnnie’s gift wasn’t it? Gift of the gab. So creative in that department that sometimes he’d believe more of his own gab than perhaps he should have. But heck, I was one of his fans, one of his believers who still held out for that big miracle, which sometime somewhere in his middle life, old cousin John was going to pull off, pull off and get himself together, really together. Like he once was. Like he was always gabbing about he’d be again.”
A group of Christian men came. Johnny's girlfriend from high school came. My dad made a tape so the family could listen. There was a microphone and one at a time, people spoke into it. My grandmother read a poem. And then at the end, my mom and I joined my dad up front.
DAD (from funeral): “I may never see the same group together again. And after I speak, that’s probably a guarantee.”
ME: “Do you remember what song we sang at Johnnie’s memorial?”
MOM: “Hobo’s Lullaby.”
ME: “I think it was Dad, maybe you too, but that was a song that I heard a lot as a lullaby going to sleep. Actually, up until the memorial, because you sang to me for a long time, long after I needed songs to go to sleep.”
DAD: “That seemed a very appropriate song for him. He was on the road a lot, camping in backyards, riding the rails. That’s the one song I’d say, I’ve always liked that song... that’s the one song that... for awhile it became hard for me to do that song after that.”
ME: “And then when dad would come to sing a song before bed, or a couple songs, I’d ask for that one because I liked it and he always used to sing it and I don’t think he ever sang it again. He said very nicely, to me, ‘I can’t sing that song.’ Did you know that?”
MOM: “I don’t remember it, but I could see that happening.” You know, he felt probably helpless, in terms of trying to really make the difference for him.”
I like to think that my dad stopped singing this song because... despite feeling helpless, he had stumbled across a way to grieve. And although it was a relief, it was also on the borderline of too intense. A place my dad would soon run away from.
DAD (from funeral): “One hell of a trick-diver at his grandmother Marmy’s pool, one hell of a yoyo champion, one hell of a soccer player, one hell of a storyteller, one hell of a dreamer. Things just didn’t quite turn out the way they’re supposed to in those storybooks.”
I tend to think of that song, Hobo’s Lullaby, as one of the few windows into my dad’s sadness. And during that funeral, we got a glimpse of my dad’s grief before the window was, once again, shut.
A few years after Johnny's death, though, my grandmother had a stroke and the process began again. This time the death took many months and my dad was put in charge of care taking. He was by her side when she died.
Soon after is when he made the discovery: my grandmother had planned her own funeral. She not only requested specific songs, but specific people to sing them. The day of the funeral arrived, and to the surprise of everyone but my grandmother, 300 people arrived.
MOM: “It was huge. And it was in that--which is a wonderful place to sing-- the Episcopal Church. Great acoustics. I mean, but it was, it was a big jump from the backyard to the Episcopal Church, 30 to 300 or 400 people.”
Afterwards, we repacked the minivan with equipment and barely made the reception in the backyard of my grandfather’s house. People shook our hands and complimented us.
MOM: “And then actually, after--the other ironic part to this is--after people heard me sing at some of these they went, ‘Oh, you’ve got a beautiful voice.’ Well all of a sudden everybody was asking me to sing. And I even had John Taylor, you know the lawyer who was a partner with Ken, came up to me and said, ‘Would you,’ at first I thought he was joking but he said, ‘Would you please sing at my memorial?”
ME: “He’s still alive, right?”
MOM: “I know, he’s still alive!”
ME: “Well, that’s, see that's, that’s, uh, thinking way ahead.”
MOM: “It was. But it was, wow. So everybody found out that I could, you know, sing and they liked my voice. And then I was getting requests to sing at memorials.”
Looking back, I can see now my grandmother’s will solidified the band. Once we played her funeral, the expectations were set. We played when my Uncle Tom died.
We played when my grandfather died.
And a funny thing happened, the more tragedy struck, the better we got. The funerals became more elaborate and ambitious. So much so, that it may be more accurate to call them concerts.
And so 10 years and multiple funerals later when my Uncle Lou died of a heart attack, my mom and I braced ourselves for the concert that would follow.
My dad and Lou had known each other since college, my dad was his best man, and, most importantly, they played music together. Lou had been a professional pianist, and when he died unexpectedly, the funeral took on a musical theme. In fact, if the others were concerts, this was Woodstock.
At this point, my dad had come a long ways from Johnny's backyard funeral. In many ways, this was my dad’s Magnum Opus. Perhaps his biggest success. Lou’s children sang, neighborhood kids got up, my dad played a song. Ironically, the family band was a tiny part of the performance. My mom and I spent most of our time in the pews. Which is why this funeral stands out. Because for the first time, we got to see my dad’s vision from the outside. And we were surprised to see that the concert was in fact, moving. Sometimes sad, sometimes uplifting.
The last performance on the program was an Oscar Peterson song recorded by... Lou himself. The recording began.
When Lou played the piano, he hummed along with the melody and he would forget to breath, taking in shrill breaths that were audible over the music.
ME: “The thing that I didn’t see coming was that you could hear Lou breathing on the recording.
DAD: “That little humming he does.”
ME: “Which is a little eery, but it’s--it’s, it’s kind of, uh... The last thing you’d expect to hear at a memorial is that person breathing.”
DAD: “Well, and I think maybe I was going a bit for the drama, but I really--it really--I found a compelling way to close. It was nice to end with the person themselves.”
During that recording of Lou, my mom began to cry. In an uncharacteristic moment, I began to cry. We had to rise and walk out first with my cousins. My mom and I supported each other, weeping uncontrollably. In the frosty Boston winter, we hugged and cried. My dad remained inside, arguing with the sound crew.
It hit me back then during the funeral and again, years later, during this interview, how far apart our experiences of this moment are. I am haunted by it, my dad breaks it apart mechanically. And I can’t help but wonder if somewhere along the way to funeral director, my dad stopped grieving and put all of himself into the show.
So to make sense of my dad’s complex relationship to grief, I turned to someone who’s seen my dad at his most vulnerable. My mom. She told me about the first time she saw him grieve, back when his grandmother died. But as time passed, my mom explained to me and my aunt, things began to change.
Hearing my mom say this, I honestly don’t know what to think. Are music and funerals an expression of my dad’s grief or a distraction? So I worked up the nerve to ask my dad about this in the most delicate way I could. Just some context, at the time of this interview, Bob, my dad’s best friend since childhood, had died of cancer.
ME: “She was crying, almost wailing. Uh, and, but then you did, well what I remember is that you went into logistics mode. You found them a plane, you arranged it. Within the hour, it felt like, we were driving them to the airport.”
DAD: “Nancy, Nancy, was unbelievable, the travel agent.”
ME: “You got them to the airport quickly, you got them a flight, with the help of Nancy, or because of Nancy, and you got them on, and they were gone. But I remember, it’s one of the few times I’ve seen you cry was once their plane took off, you disappeared actually, I couldn’t, I didn’t see where you went. And then I found you under a tree or something, kind of crying by yourself. I don’t know, for me, that’s kind of like a microcosm of, of the--for you, you’re going to help other people first, and then once that plane has taken off...”
DAD: “That’s a good point. Yeah, I get teary-eyed just thinking about it. Yeah, that’s a good point. I guess I am--I guess I do have that mode. So that’s, and then that’s one reason why I like--really, that’s one reason why I like helping with memorials because it delays--you know, it keeps that person alive a little longer before I have to grieve for them. So very selfish in some ways. And then maybe you could call that denial, so maybe there is a little bit of denial but I find like those few times where we’ve delayed a memorial like I think for, uh, my dad, we delayed it a few months, it, it, it actually--it delayed my grieving but it also let me collect my thoughts a little bit more.”
On some level, I’ve always known that funerals were my dad’s way of burying his head in the sand. I talked with my mom, and she mostly agrees. But, she said, something occurred to her while performing, recently, and she thought it might help.
Could this be, my mom wondered, what my dad had been feeling all along? A kind of grief by proxy?
For me, the answer didn’t come during the interviews. It happened later. My dad burned my girlfriend a Best Of Funeral Compilation. On the drive home from Santa Barbara to San Francisco, my girlfriend and I popped it into the dashboard. And something unexpected happened: I felt proud. I watched my girlfriend’s face as she drove, hoping the music would bring tears to her eyes or at least a sniffle.
“Listen to this one,” I said. “You can hear my uncle breathing... This one has my cousin on it...”
And that’s when it hit me.
We can feel pain. We can feel loss. But only through the guile of a performance.
And so, if I should lose someone close to me, here’s what you can do. Watch me play. Let the music move you. Let me watch the music move you. And then come up to me afterwards and let me shrug in modesty, crack a joke. Let me pretend I don’t care. But let me think, secretly: Yes, I’m the son of a funeral planner. Yes, I play in the Family Funeral Band. And yes, we’d love to play at your funeral.
Credits
Special thanks to my mom, Joni Pascal, and my dad, Ted Rhodes. My dad currently has a band that is not made up of his family and does not play funerals. Check them out at their facebook page: The Americana Cats. Also, special thanks to Ashleyanne Krigbaum, Rachel Rhodes, Shoshana Walter.
Music:
"Upbeat" by Jon Luc Hefferman is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.
freemusicarchive.org/music/Jon_Luc_…ic_1841/Upbeat
Based on a work at needledrop.co
All other songs were by the family funeral band and were recorded by my dad, Ted Rhodes.
Music:
"Upbeat" by Jon Luc Hefferman is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 International License.
freemusicarchive.org/music/Jon_Luc_…ic_1841/Upbeat
Based on a work at needledrop.co
All other songs were by the family funeral band and were recorded by my dad, Ted Rhodes.