Playing Horn at St. Bernard Abbey

TubeNet is my new favorite site. I’m completely sucked in. Yes, there are thousands of web forums out there where people get together to toast their shared obsessions, but you really have to check TubeNet out. Thousands of tubists congregate there; hundreds check back every day to advise each other on everything from picking out a mouthpiece to dealing with onstage hiccups. They share triumphs (I landed that Oktoberfest gig!) and swap jokes. It’s really great.

My third year of tuba I got interested in trumpet. I had a gig with a monastery pep band… I had two hours a day I could spend playing ball or praying. I found a mint condition Olds trumpet nobody knew about. I had a dramatics hall to myself to practice in. I wanted to be Harry James and have ladies palpitating over me. I busted out of the monastery.

Dennis Gray, another off-shoot of another thread, TubeNet, March 22, 2004.

This post from Dennis Gray might have been the most intriguing one I found while I was researching our Tubas show. I had to get the backstory, so I called him up.

Apparently when you bust out of a monastery with dreams of palpitating ladies, you stay out. Now Dennis lives on Alabama’s Gulf Coast (we pronounce it “Guf Coast,” he says). He spends his days playing Parrothead beachparties with his band, John Reno and the Half-Fast Creekers. He plays tuba, and he plays it proud.

I lived at Saint Bernard Abbey for about a year, studying to be a priest. It was a Benedictine monastery. Lots of monasteries have pep bands, actually. I took up any instrument I could get my hands on– guitar, drums, trumpet, anything. I ended up in the trumpet choir. Let me tell you — we had an organ with four keyboards, the pipes going right through the ceiling, plus nine trumpets, and then 400 monks singing gregorian chants, too. When we got playing, that sound would blast. I mean it would part your hair.

I was a trumpet player for 27 years, but then I went to Siberia for vacation — Siberia, that prime vacation destination — and I bought a tuba off a guy for ten bucks. That was it for me.

Dennis Gray, in a conversation with Open Source, March 9, 2007.

I think what really caught my eye about that original TubeNet post was a throwaway caveat at the bottom. It’s one piece of advice for party-hardy tubists that the brothers at St. Bernard might have approved of:

And NO KISSIN’ WOMEN (a lot) or the chops turn to rubber.

Dennis Gray, another off-shoot of another thread, TubeNet, March 22, 2004.

Kissing just makes your musculature turn to mush. You kiss a girl all night — I mean all night, like you did back in high school — the next day you can forget about playing horn.

Dennis Gray, in a conversation with Open Source, March 9, 2007.