Barely a month after that fateful day when Karl and I decided to take our accordions out onto the street and play them in public for the first time, he phoned me with an interesting offer.
“Hey, Joey! How’d you like to play accordion on the radio?”
“What? How?”
“John Southworth’s going to be doing a live session on CBC radio to promote his new album. I did session work on a couple of numbers on the album, and one of them has an accordion. He thought it would be cool to have two accordions backing him up when he did it live.”
“Count me in!”
Karl brought me a copy of John’s then-new album, Sedona Arizona. He didn’t send me an MP3 file: you have to remember that this was a month before the original Napster was released and that I was considered to have advanced home connectivity, what with my 56K modem.
The song we were to play was called Veto Valvoline, a whimsical laundry list-type song featruing words beginning with the letter “V”. We transcribed a chord chart and practiced it ourselves; a day later, John came to practice it with us. We rehearsed in my condo’s gym as the puzzled-looking cleaning staff looked on.
On the day of the studio session, Karl gave me a call with a wacky idea.
“We should dress up for this big event. Suits, ascots, hats.”
“You realize, Karl,” I said, “that we’re dressing up for radio.”
“Aw, c’mon, it’ll be fun.”
So we did, and John and the hosts of the show were rather amused to see these two guys with accordions walk in, dressed like Fuller Brush salesmen. Here’s a photo of us in action:
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