Bad Breeze (1978)

Genre: Accordion Blues

When I was a child growing up in Southwest Michigan, I attended the Kalamazoo Conservatory of Music. While that may sound impressive, I should explain that while the word “conservatory” usually brings to mind a serious musical education at some distinguished East Coast institute—in my hometown, it meant accordion lessons.

The “conservatory” was a center for the promotion of budding accordionists or—as I have come to reflect on it now—a pretext for getting unsuspecting local families to part with some of their hard-earned cash for expensive, reed-based instruments, imported from Europe. Watch the scene from Weird Al’s recent biopic with the door-to-door accordion salesman and you can easily imagine what type of slick pitch was employed. Unlike the film, my parents did not beat the guy up. Instead, they forked over $900 for their eldest son’s musical education. I, in turn, was lured by the prospect of becoming the next Charles Magnante (whoever he was).

And so my parents bought me a beautiful, black, Italian-made instrument distributed by the Noble company in Chicago. They had me affix large letters on the front of the accordion spelling out my first name to underscore the pride they felt whenever their “Chuck” performed at his annual recitals and band concerts. The letters were juxtaposed in such a way that it looked like “Chuck Noble” was either my name or the instrument’s. So, just as B. B. King had his “Lucille,” I had my “Chuck Noble.” Over the years, it has also become my pseudonym whenever I pick up a squeezebox to play.

During the heyday of my “conservatory” instruction, every Monday my mother would drive me 30 minutes into Kalamazoo from our suburban home for my weekly private lesson and every Wednesday my father would drive me back downtown for my evening accordion band rehearsal.

When I say “band,” picture a dimly lit, repurposed warehouse, hot and humid in summer, drafty in winter. We are 30 odd young people, dutifully sitting on folding chairs, accordions resting on our laps with black music stands in front of us filled with folders of blue mimeographed sheet music. We are all playing in unison a pop song from our parents’ generation, or sometimes (to our great excitement) a new tune by Burt Bacharach or Lennon and McCartney.

Occasionally the band director would bring in a hand-written “second” accordion part so that half of the assembled kids played the melody and the other half played the accompaniment. Since none of us really wanted to play the second part (because it didn’t sound like the song we knew), most of the time we were just a bunch of kids playing exactly the same notes. The well-known Far Side cartoon (“Welcome to hell. Here’s your accordion”) comes close to depicting the netherworld that parents and luckless passersby must have endured on those stiflingly hot, Midwest summer evenings. At the end of our allotted hour, we would clear out and make way for the more “advanced” band’s rehearsal. Indeed, there were different levels of accordion band at the Kalamazoo Conservatory of Music. To this day I have no idea why.

As the 1960s wore on and rock music took over as the soundtrack for our generation, the popularity of the accordion waned as we all attempted to distance ourselves from the music, inclinations, and culture of our parents. While I would occasionally play for my friends for laughs, the accordion just wasn’t cool anymore. In fact, A Child’s Garden of Grass: The Official Handbook for Marijuana Users explicitly cited accordion music as something you did not want to listen to when you were high. And so the accordion was relegated to the closet, both literally and figuratively. Accordionists may take comfort in the fact that there are fewer accordion than banjo jokes, but that’s not much consolation.

While it would be an exaggeration to call what I experienced musical “trauma,” I do feel I have spent some significant part of my adult life trying to overcome issues associated with my association with the Kalamazoo Conservatory of Music. Even now, when I play the piano, I don’t really know the proper way to hold my fingers relative to a real keyboard; my left hand is clumsy and, of habit, wants to stab at buttons.

In the late 1970s, I found my way back to the accordion by way of Zydeco and the blues. I became a big fan of the late Clifton Chenier and bought as many records in the Arhoolie catalog as I could. I loved the musette sound of a “wet-tuned” squeezebox and soon realized the accordion was capable of far more than polka and pop songs.

Today, the accordion is witnessing a resurgence, thanks in part to the interest in world music, and other prized ethnic musics, many of which feature the accordion as a lead instrument. Artists have included it on their records for its unique timbre, charm, or eccentricity. Even Bob Dylan’s recent albums have featured accordionists (Jeff Taylor or Shahzad Ismaily) on many tracks.

Bottom line—the accordion is cool again. I would have no more success today convincing the young musicians I know that the accordion is a goof bomb instrument for people who can’t play the piano than I was able to convince my teenage compatriots in the ‘60s that I wasn’t a stooge of the establishment for playing one.

So, what better time to allow my alter ego, Chuck Noble, to step out from the shadows and ride the crest of this new wave of enthusiasm?

I wrote “Bad Breeze” in 1978 as a novelty song. At the time I was studying the blues idiom on guitar and had an encyclopedia of blues lyrics, many of them rich with sexual innuendo. [The Blues Line: A Collection of Blues Lyrics from Leadbelly to Muddy Waters, Compiled by Eric Sackheim]. I decided I would write an accordion blues, using as many of these double entendres as I could possibly get into one song and as many of the Clifton Chenier licks as I had mastered. (I was still under the illusion that would have to make the accordion an object of my own self-deprecation in order to make it palatable for the times.) I was also influenced by the Who’s song “Squeezebox” (1975), which, as Weird Al has rightly pointed out, doesn’t even have an accordion in it!! A glaring omission I hope has been amply remedied in this song. I’ve only tweaked the lyrics a little from the original 1978 prototype for this 2024 studio version. Thanks again to Band-in-a-Box™ for all the other non-accordion back-up.