First Bass

I'm sure there are those who took up playing the tuba because it was easy. I knew one of them. He was my father. It was important to have at least seven sousaphones, the portable equivalent of a tuba, to spell out "BOULDER" across the bells of the high school marching band. If you didn't play, at least you could carry it. My father learned one valve combination: one and three would make a "C". He spent a good deal of time holding an instrument and earning an easy credit or two.
I would like to say that I was following in my father's footsteps, but he wasn't my inspiration for picking up the low end of the brass family. I made my decision when I was in sixth grade and I went to a Boulder High football game. It was an away game, so the Pep Band was there instead of the full-on marching band. I noticed that the tuba players seemed to be having the best time. They seemed to be the most colorful personalities in the group, and so I decided that I would begin my tuba career the following year in junior high. This caused a minor uproar in the halls of my elementary school since I had bypassed Miss Colson's instrumental music program entirely, and even though I had been taking piano lessons for several years already at home. What made me think that I could just show up in seventh grade and start playing tuba?
As it turned out, they didn't even have a tuba when I first got to Centennial Junior High. After a summer of learning to play on a sousaphone I borrowed from the high school, they wanted me to switch to a baritone, higher in pitch and smaller in stature. I found it frustrating and confounding and felt a great relief when they were at last able to get me my own sousaphone. I was the only tuba player in our junior high, and when I got to high school, I found out that I was generally the exception to the rule, which was this: no one plays tuba full-time. Most often, a clever or talented musician from some other section of the band was asked to switch and play tuba to have the low end covered. I started to understand the bias against bass players early on. During concert band season, many of the pieces and arrangements we played included not just brief periods of rest for our section, but sometimes entire pages would go by without a note to play. I sat in the back with two other guys who were getting their credit much the same way my father had, and counted the rests. But marching band gave me a chance to shine, and pep band gave me a place to be a star.
My tuba career ended after high school. There was some brief notions of studying music in college, but I had already taken it as seriously as I was able. The notion of counting another three or four years of rests at the back of somebody else's concert band was numbing to me. Still, every now and then, like when I see the senior tuba player dot the "I" in "Ohio", I get a little wistful for what might have been.