Squeeze the day
I knew it would be another strange night when Susan Hwang showed up with an old accordion and a sledgehammer.
We were about to perform with our unlikely band: The Main Squeeze Orchestra, 15 women playing 15 accordions.
The New York club Irving Plaza had booked us to open for a group as offbeat as we were, Gogol Bordello, an Eastern European punk band known for its raucous performances. In a nod to both them and Jimi Hendrix, Hwang decided to destroy an accordion onstage.
As she took some practice swings, the club began to fill with people who were either drunk or close to it. I looked around and wondered, “How did I get here?”
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The accordion’s reputation has been marred by the very people who earn their living from it: Lawrence Welk, Weird Al Yankovic and blue tuxedo-clad wedding bands everywhere.
It doesn’t matter that Elvis played it. (A photo of the young, thin Elvis with the instrument strapped to his chest is hanging in my teacher’s shop.) Or that breaking it out is guaranteed to get a party going.
It’s still the Urkel of instruments, something to pity not embrace.
So when I went to our first full orchestra rehearsal in 2002 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, I expected to be joining my fellow nerds, most likely some nice suburban ladies with poodle appliques on their sweater vests. Instead, I found 20- and 30-something New York musicians who preferred Joy Division to “Lady of Spain.”
It seems that downtown, the accordion had become cool.
I should have known. The orchestra’s founder, Walter Kuehr – accordion designer, teacher, repairman and booster – is like a missing member of the Rat Pack, a character straight out of characterville.
A 50-year-old German immigrant who came to New York to study jazz, Kuehr owns a shop near Chinatown called, of course, Main Squeeze. He parks his motorcycle inside the store’s front entrance and stocks cocktails in the back. Against one wall is a small cage with a sign “Beast of the Week,” where he keeps an accordion he “dares” customers to play.
He leads a swing band called “Last of the International Playboys,” wears only the sharpest suits, and when asked why he attracts mostly female students, looks down at the floor sheepishly and just laughs.
Drawing band members from his roster of students, Kuehr set us up like any orchestra, with sections from first through fourth chair, anchored by a bass accordion – a monster instrument that at its lowest register can rattle your teeth.
We started out with easy music that reminded me of arrangements for a high school band. (“Glow Worm” became one of our early signature pieces.) Soon we were performing in clubs and at cultural events, and even though we attracted large crowds, we quickly learned a hard lesson: There’s nothing quite so painful as polite applause.
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Turns out, it’s not easy for 15 accordions to perform together. It’s almost impossible to hear yourself, let alone the other players. And it didn’t help that our skill levels varied from virtuoso to novice.
The result?
Sometimes we ended each piece together and sometimes we didn’t. Like a runaway car, we’d inexplicably speed up mid-song, then slow to a crawl. Kuehr’s conducting became bigger and more frenetic as he tried to control us.
At one community gig, we went on after members of a senior citizens’ center who wore sequined vests and lip-synched to “All That Jazz.” They got a better response than we did.
A New York-based male accordionist, jealous of the attention we drew despite our uneven performances, threatened to start an all-male accordion orchestra to steal the spotlight. (He never did.)
Our pre-show discussions revolved around whether drinking more (or less) would improve our shows. Some players started bringing their own flasks.
Ultimately, we realized we needed to rehearse more and, with that change, we got better. Our music became more sophisticated – from Bach to Kurt Weill to Queen – and we had more requests to play than we could manage (although one prospective booker thought we were a burlesque troupe). The Village Voice said we had the best all-girl band gimmick in the city.
There were times in the first year or so when I wanted to quit. I felt humiliated onstage.
But then I realized that no matter how many times we bombed, it was always great to step outside the dead-seriousness of adulthood and do something ridiculous like playing James Brown with 14 other accordionists while a friend smashed an instrument into pulp in front of a crowd.
That night at Irving Plaza, I realized how lucky I am: I’m with the band.