I arrived on Day 1 of the festival and was going to spend a long time in the registration line, when some friends — Min Jung Kim and Rannie Turingan — who were on the “How to Kick Ass at Your First SxSW” panel heard I’d arrived. They somehow used their panel host powers to fast-track me through registration, bring me up to their panel (which was full of big names), and then play accordion for the audience.
That’s what the photo above shows. The best part? I’m literally upstagingTim Ferriss.
A photo I took during Hurricane Irma, which shows my Android phone with the FM radio app on.
When Hurricane Irma closed in on the Tampa Bay area Sunday evening, the power went out at around 7:30, and soon afterward, cellular service became spotty and then disappeared entirely. However, we weren’t cut off from information about Irma because we fell back on a 1930s technology, FM radio, which is built into every smartphone, and accessible on many Android phones (including mine).
In the age of the smartphone, you might think your Android or iPhone can replace a radio receiver as a lifeline during a disaster. After all, while a radio receiver is audio-only and one-way, your smartphone can both send and receive text, audio, picture, video, and location information — but only if the cellular towers nearby are up and running. If the nearby tower is damaged, loses power, or gets overloaded, you’ll be cut off and left with the dreaded “No Service” indicator on your phone.
Consult just about any disaster preparation guide for a checklist of “must-haves”, and one of the items on that checklist will be a battery-powered radio. When phone and internet service fails, you can fall back on radio as long as you have batteries. (Better still, if you have a radio with a hand-crank generator, you don’t even need batteries.)
We have a nearly century-long tradition of radio stations providing vital information during disasters of all kinds. In the case of Irma, they did one better and teamed up with TV newsrooms. During the storm, many radio stations in the Tampa area teamed up with TV stations to provide continuous coverage of and information about the storm, such as where it was, how quickly and in which direction it was moving, and what to do. It was a valuable resource for many people, and it may have even saved a few lives.
You may think that you don’t own a portable FM radio, but chances are that you do. It’s just hidden away in your smartphone.
Just about every mobile phone maker — even the big ones who manufacture their own processor and graphics chips, such as Apple and Samsung — gets their cellular modem chipsets from a single manufacturer: Qualcomm. In fact, Qualcomm pretty much has a monopoly on these chipsets, which in addition to sending and receiving cellular signals, have an FM receiver baked in. You wouldn’t know it in the U.S., as fewer than half the smartphones have the FM receiver enabled, and they’re all Androids.
My Android phone is a Moto G4, and in addition to having an enabled FM receiver, it also comes “out of the box” with the FM Radio app, which simply provides a user interface for the FM radio capability. When the power went out in our part of Tampa on Sunday at around 7:30 p.m. and the cell service disappeared shortly after, I fired up the FM Radio app and we had updates on the storm’s progress all night long. In fact, I also used the phone’s FM radio and all day the next day — and there was still battery power to spare and the end. That’s because FM radio uses considerably less power than just about any smartphone function (and it uses no data at all!).
My iPhone doesn’t expose its FM radio capability, and it was useless as a source of updates until the cellular connectivity improved the next day, well after the storm had passed. I can’t say for certain, but I’ll just blame Apple designer Jony Ive, who’s never met a much-loved traditional feature that he didn’t like to remove. I get the feeling that FM radio is too distastefully old school to include as an iPhone capability, even though it’s already there.
While I experienced the usefulness of FM radio in smartphones during an emergency firsthand for the first time during Irma, it’s been clear to broadcasters and public safety officials — FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) included (see the video above) — that there are great benefits to unleashing this capability. The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has been lobbying to require the FM radio capability to be enabled in smartphones, and even Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been advocating for this (but he won’t go beyond advocacy). At an NAB event in February, he said:
“It seems odd that every day we hear about a new smartphone app that lets you do something innovative, yet these modern-day mobile miracles don’t enable a key function offered by a 1982 Sony Walkman.”
The go-to place for the movement to make the FM radio capability that’s already in our phones, waiting to be unleashed, is FreeRadioOnMyPhone.org. It has the latest info on the movement to enable FM radio on smartphones, including:
How to get FM radio working on your Android phone
How to contact Apple to ask them to enable FM radio listening on their phones
How to contact the FCC and ask them to require FM radio be made available on phones
And finally, an article that needs to be pointed out because it’s dead wrong (and unsurprisingly, published by 2010-era Business Insider, from the time they were almost stealing content): Mandatory FM Radio: A Dumb Idea For Smart Phones, in which its clueless author says that it’s just a move to prop up the dying terrestrial radio industry.
As with other articles in this series, I’m including an appropriate music video:
In the late summer of 1998, I was chatting with my friend Rob in my apartment, which was then smack in the middle of downtown Toronto, at the corner of Yonge and College Streets. The living room windows looked south on Yonge along the wide part between College and Gerrard, where the sidewalks are wide and busy with people making their way towards the livelier part near the Eaton Centre. Not far away and six storeys down, a guy with a guitar was playing to passers-by. A number of women were gathered around him.
“Look at that,” I said after taking a swig of beer. “Now there’s something I could probably do. Too bad I can’t play guitar. Never had the talent for anything that doesn’t have a piano keyboard. I’ve been thinking about heading down to the Church Street pawn shops and looking at some accordions.”
“You know, I’ve got an accordion in my parents’ basement,” Rob answered. “It’s been there since the end of high school, and I sure as hell don’t play it. You want it?”
“Sure,” I replied. “It could be fun.”
Late 1998 – Early 1999: A Few Trial Runs
A few days later, Rob met me downtown and brought a brown suitcase. Inside it was a barely-used accordion: a black Titano student model, with 120 bass buttons, covered in lots of chrome and “mother-of-toilet-seat” (my nickname for fake mother-of-pearl) keys.
Karl Mohr and me (with one of Erik Mohr’s paintings in the background), early 1999.
Over the next few months, I would play the accordion only a couple of times. I played my synthesizers considerably more often. The photo above shows ome of those rare moments: me with my friend Karl Mohr, playing accordion at his brother Erik Mohr’s art show at a gallery downtown. Even then, I was still more of a synth guy — we were providing background noise at Erik’s show, with Karl spending more time playing my accordion and me on a Roland MC-303 Groovebox dance music machine.
I didn’t start playing the accordion seriously until May 1, 1999.
Saturday, May 1, 1999
A couple of days before May 1st, I got a phone call from Karl inviting me to an event at Queen’s Park.
“It’s a protest thing,” he said. “Against hospital cuts. It’s a good cause, they’re looking for musicians to come and play and it sounds like fun. I just got my own accordion and thought maybe we could do something together. What d’you think?”
I didn’t give it much thought and said “Sounds like fun. I’m in.”
Karl and me, out on the town on the first day out with our accordions.
That year, the first of May was one of the first truly warm days of that year. It was the kind of day when you’d feel guilty for staying inside when you just had to be outside: bright and cloudless, with the streets filling with people who’d switched to their summer clothes. There couldn’t have been a more perfect day for the both of us to take our accordions out on the street for the first time.
At Queen’s Park, Toronto.
Karl and I had jammed together before, on synths, so we were pretty used to improvising instrumental pieces together. For the first little while, we did just that.
“What songs do you guys know?” someone asked.
“I don’t really follow pop tunes,” Karl said to me. “You know any?”
It hadn’t occurred to us to come up with a list of songs or to rehearse them, and we hadn’t rehearsed. We’d simply gone out on the street with our accordions to see what would happen.
At Queen’s Park, Toronto.
“Let’s do some standards,” I said. “I – IV – Vm in A,” I said to Karl and started playing Wild Thing by The Troggs.
“I can play along, but I don’t know the words,” yelled Karl over the chords. “You have to sing!”
It was my first time as a lead vocalist, and I’d never really sung and played an instrument at the same time, especially a relatively unfamiliar instrument. In spite of this, it wasn’t difficult. It just felt right.
Most of the musicians there had guitars and various flavours of African drum. We were the only accordion players present, and for many of the people there, it was the first time that they’d ever seen an accordion up close. A number of people were surprised to see rock and pop music being played on accordion, as if they couldn’t possibly play the same notes that the other more common instruments play.
In an alley, on our way towards Queen West.
We hung around Queen’s Park for a short while, after which we decided to wander about downtown. Wherever we went, we were stopped by people who were curious about a couple of guys walking around with accordions. A lot of people had come out that gorgeous day, and we stopped at nearly every block to play a number for a new audience.
In an alley, on our way towards Queen West.
We ended up on Queen Street, heading westward from University Avenue. This was when the stretch of Queen between University and Bathurst was a little edgier than it is now, back before Parkdale was what it is now, when the Drake and Gladstone were still run-down fleabag hotels, before there was a Loblaws, back when Igor was still a master bike thief who was considered by some to be an urban legend. It was also a time when Toronto’s best-known goth night club, the Sanctuary Vampire Sex Bar, was still operating. (If you’re wondering what became of it, it’s now the Starbucks on the north side of Queen Street, just east of Trinity Bellwoods Park.)
Tales from the Sanctuary, the Vampire Sex Bar is an actual book you can buy!
It was still the middle of the afternoon when we walked by Sanctuary, which meant that its doors should’ve been shut and the place should’ve been quiet. However, its doors were open and there was music playing. Between the weather and the accordions, the whole afternoon had an “anything can happen” kind of feel to it, and that’s probably why we walked through those doors to see what was going on.
It turned out that the staff were mopping the floors and the doors had been opened to helped them dry more quickly. DJ Todd was in his booth, trying out some new music that he’d just bought. A couple of the bouncers, Darren and Mark, were helping out and were greatly amused by the sight of a couple of guys with accordions wandering into a goth bar. Mark decided that he had to pose for a picture with us and we were only too happy to oblige:
Me, “Marky Mark”, and Karl at the Sanctuary Vampire Sex Bar.
Darren said “Hey, it’s Mark’s birthday. Why don’t you play Happy Birthday for Marky Mark?”
“Let’s goth it up,” said Karl, with a glance in my direction.
“Minor key, maybe? G minor,” I said, and then we took Happy Birthday in a decidedly Marilyn Manson direction, ending it with the line “Don’t like the cake, but the cake likes me”, a reference to this goth hit.
Mark was quite happy with his little birthday gift and asked for one more: a chance for both him and Darren to pose with our accordions. Once again, we were only too happy to oblige:
The bouncers pose with our accordions.Let’s get a closer look!
After we took the photos above, DJ Todd emerged from the DJ booth. “I have a weird idea. Wanna play in front of an audience?”
“Sure,” I said. “Who else is here?”
“No,” replied Todd. “I’m talking about tonight, when we’re open. What if we put you on stage, in front of everyone on the dance floor? We’ll mic you, you play.”
“Sounds like fun,” I said, and Karl nodded.
“Okay. Come back tonight. Play something that the crowd can get into, and if they like you, if you get any applause at all, I will set you up at the bar with all the beer you can drink.”
“You’re on.”
A Night to Remember
We went back to my apartment to pick up a change of clothes for me, as well as figure out what we were going to play that night. As I pulled out some appropriately black clothing, Karl was going through my CD collection.
“Godlike would work, but it’s just not the same without that guitar riff,” he said, holding up a KMFDM CD.
“Virus might be doable,” I said. “And hey, someday I’d love to do an accordion version of Stray Bullet, but I can’t imagine doing that without being backed by a sequencer or maybe the Groovebox. We’ve got only a couple of hours, so I think we need to pick something simple. Something we already know by heart.”
Bow down before the box you squeeze / You’re going some beer for free
A little more searching through the CDs led us to Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine. As soon as we saw it, we said “Head Like a Hole!“ nearly simultaneously. It was fitting: I met Karl at Crazy Go Nuts University at an event where I was the DJ; he heard me play Head Like a Hole and came to the DJ booth to compliment me on my taste in music.
It didn’t take us long to work out an arrangement, after which we went to Karl’s place to get him a change of clothes and grab a bite to eat before returning to Sanctuary.
Karl and me, before our performance.
We arrived at Sanctuary a little before 10 p.m., clad in head-to-toe black, with our accordions at the ready. The club’s owner, a big guy who went by the name “Lance Goth”, saw us coming, shook his head and cradled his face in his hand. “Now this…” he said, “this is a sign of the Apocalypse.”
We were escorted in and put onstage, and DJ Todd introduced us. “You’re not truly hardcore unless you have…an accordion!” he said, and we immediately broke into Head Like a Hole.
At first, the crowd looked at us with great disbelief, but by the final chorus of “Bow down before the one you serve / You’re going to get what you deserve”, we’d won them over. When we finished, they erupted into applause, and we climbed down from the stage, accepting handshakes and high-fives from all directions.
Todd put on a song and led us to the bar. “Give these guys all the beer they can drink,” he told the bartender, who grabbed a pitcher and asked “What’ll you have?”
Karl and me, after our performance.
Our new-found goth celebrity status made it easy for us to get a place to sit at the crowded club. People were only too willing to let us join them, and we shared the contents of our bottomless pitchers with the fans we’d made.
“This is insane!” I told Karl. “I’ve been playing synths for years and was always second fiddle to the guys on guitars and drums. I’m on the accordion a single day and all this has happened.”
“I know! The accordion is so uncool that it’s cool.”
“I don’t know about you,” I said, “but I’m thinking of carrying it around more often. It’s like a big good luck charm.“
Some of my audience outside Amato’s pizza on that first night.
When last call came about, Karl headed home to make his appointment with his girlfriend. Having no one with whom to make a similar booking, I went to what was then Amato’s, a pizza place that stayed open late and was popular with the club crowd. I got a slice when I got another “Hey, do you know how to play that thing?”
“I sure hope so,” I said. “Otherwise I’m just walking around with twenty-ish pounds of fashion accessory”.
I started playing whatever songs came to mind and whose lyrics I could remember and whose chords I could fake. Luckily for me, the dirty secret of rock and roll songs is that most of them boil down to one of six or seven patterns, and it’s a matter of knowing the words. I played, and somehow pulled it off. In return, someone took up a collection for me in an empty pizza plate and put it at my feet, and when I counted the money, it had turned out to be around fifty bucks — not bad for a half hour’s playing. Walter, Amato’s manager, brought me a slice of pollo basilico pizza.
“Here you go…” Walter said. Not knowing my name, he finished his sentence by calling me “Accordion Guy”. The others heard, and they started calling me that, and the name stuck.
At the end of the night — about three-thirty a.m. or so — I made my way home, tired but exhilarated from a very full day.
Aftermath
Still one of the best accordion pictures ever.
Since that day, I’ve often taken the accordion with me whenever I’ve gone out socially. It’s paid off in all sorts of ways, from making new friends to landing my last few jobs to discovering opportunities that would’ve otherwise passed me by to things like the photo above. It’s brought me through good times and some of the roughertimes I’ve had to face over the past couple of years. It’s practically part of me.
Happy anniversary, accordion. Thanks for everything!
One of the songs in my MP3 collection that’s on heavy rotation is Cage the Elephant’s Beck-ish, slide-guitar southern-rock-y ode to “doin’ what you gotta”, Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked. It practically begs for an accordion version, so I’m learning it in order to add it to my repertoire, which could stand a little refreshing.
While I haven’t learned the song well enough to perform it unaccompanied, I’ve had just enough practice to do it as an accordion karaoke number, which I did at last week’s Loser Karaoke. Loser Karaoke is a regular Thursday night event at Tequila Sunrise where having a good time trumps singing ability. It helps that Jason Rolland is an entertaining karaoke host. As an added bonus, it’s where a lot of the people from Accordion City’s high-tech, startup, social media entrepreneur scene come to cut loose. For more on Loser Karaoke, check out their Facebook page.
I should feel ashamed to say this, but a decade’s worth of public accordion playing has attenuated my ability to feel shame: the reason I know about Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked isn’t because I’m dialed into the alt-rock music scene. Thanks to middle age, I used to be with it, but they’ve since changed what “it” was. I know about the song because of…well, a video game. Namely, Borderlands, which uses the song in its intro sequence:
For the curious (and the fans), here’s Cage the Elephant’s official video for Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked. Enjoy!
“This musical instrument is undoubtedly one of the most popular nowadays,” goes the article. “First accordions appeared in Russia in the beginning of the 19th century, and thanks to original sounding and visual appeal, they soon became rather popular. Number of accordion masters has grown so much that their making became number two in Tula.”
The accordions that this factory makes are gorgeous, as are the photos in the article. If you’ve ever wondered how accordions are made, check out the article!
In the late summer of 1998, I was chatting with my friend Rob in my apartment, which was then smack in the middle of downtown Toronto, at the 
