When I was about 9 years old, I was given a Casio keyboard for Christmas by my mom. It was your average, maybe slightly above average, amateur level keyboard, something you might buy at a electronics store as opposed to a toy store, but the kind of keyboard that is really only meant for very casual play.
For a small minority of children and adults who may have owned one of these kinds of keyboards, it was a tool which provided a gateway into a more serious world of musicianship, the kind of device whose value is shown as a demonstration of possibility, as opposed to a tool of mastery. It could have inspired piano lessons to begin for one child, or the percussion pad could have inspired another kid to be on the percussion line in high school marching band, or to start their own little rock band.
I never really had any musical “talent” per se – I was never more than second chair saxophone in junior high school, never more than third chair in the second-tier high school band ensemble (there were however 4 separate tiers of bands – honors, symphonic, concert one, and concert two). Perhaps it should have been obvious that I wasn’t really meant to play music, and I could have been directed in a different direction. I was always pretty bad at both woodwinds and singing anything with vocals – I could squeak the lowest notes on an elementary school recorder and somehow manage to make something that sounds already unspeakably ugly into something that is so close to injury, and much closer to insult.
I hope I am not alone when I say that I have had many nightmares about the sound a recorder makes. I remembered having a few so severe that I woke up in a pool of sweat, my ears and brain ringing loudly as 20 children dutifully play HOT CROSS BUNS on their plastic pretend clarinet, squawking and hoo-hooing into a loose collection of aural pollution. This is a sound that I never want to bring to the surface, yet it still lingers in my long-suffering brain.
That Casio keyboard that my mom gave me ended up being used very infrequently. Why, I am not exactly sure – I think it stems down to the fact that my mother didn’t have time to teach me what she knew of the piano, and I wanted more buttons. BUTTONS BUTTONS BUTTONS. I had a limitless appetite for buttons and the possibilities they represent. Buttons mean options. Options cure boredom. The possibility of what comes next is an invigorating, sustaining feeling, whether it comes from knowing how high the A/C can go in a car’s climate control panel, or the satisfying click a thermostat produces when you’ve got it just right.
The Casio model that she gave me for Christmas was new, it had more keys, but less buttons. It had no percussion pad at all. So I usually just played the demonstration mode, which was a soft and sweet synth march to “American Patrol”. I would play that over and over, seemingly happy to pretend I had the skills to make that happen. It began to collect dust as I gravitated towards another toy fantasy – the game Mario Paint on Super Nintendo. I tweaked out on that product for hours, well into the post-SNICK and pre-SNL night. I would gladly miss the chance to see Cody from “Step By Step” on TGIF if it meant I could draw 16-bit graffiti with a bespoke Nintendo mouse.
My Casio keyboard just sat unused in my bedroom, collecting dust like a concertina or a Brownie camera. However, it found a forever home and left my household one day, when my mom’s heavy metal rock star acquaintances, waking up from a ‘hell bent for leather’ esque guitar jam the night before, noticed the keyboard on my desk.
He was a bass guitarist and probably high on amphetamines, but he noticed that my Casio was barely used at all. And he too had a Casio keyboard, it was an SK-5. When I finally got a chance to see HIS keyboard, I was in love. I HAD TO HAVE THAT KEYBOARD.
It was missing a key altogether, and was starting to show signs of that Japanese plastic appliance decay, where the dark grey becomes this brittle, sunburned ashy color. It was a few years older than my keyboard, but it had the most profound and important feature ever – A PERCUSSION PAD WITH THE “LION” NOISE! And it had “dog”, “vibraphone”, and “typewriter”, and other very gimmicky synthesized treatments. I could “arf arf arf” to my heart’s content to the tunes of “Chopsticks”, “Greensleeves”, and “Hot Cross Buns”! I was literally rapt in euphoria with that keyboard’s possibilities!
The heavy metal dude offered to trade his keyboard for mine, and I had never made a more certain decision in my life – I didn’t consult my mother, and I didn’t care. I was satisfied beyond words, even though I probably accepted a very lopsided and unfair trade.
I was more than satisfied – I pretended to be Gloria Estefan and sang “rhythm is gonna get you” and promptly pressed LION and went “OOOF“. The lion noise is epic. It is the thing that introduced me to a later life of loving anything electronic in terms of pop music. I had a Miami Sound Machine of my own! So a keyboard could inspire me, even if I couldn’t play anything on it worth a damn. Rhythm did get me, Ms. Stefan! Thanks, heavy metal man, for a more than a fair trade.
My mom was upset that I traded keyboards at first, but she eventually realized that it’s not gonna get played anyway, so why not let me have the occasional fun with a chorus of electronic dogs barking at set intervals. Oh, the possibilities…
