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Notes from a Battered Grand: A Memoir/Fifty Years of Music, from Honky-Tonk to High Society
A personal memoir of a life of obscurity in the music business chronicles the author's numerous gigs in hotel lounges, roadside honky-tonks, Mafia dens, and socialite clubs over the last fifty years. National ad/promo. Tour.
305 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 1992
30 people want to read
About the author
Don Asher
24 books1 followerDr. Lois Goodwill is a retired clinical psychologist. Born in Montreal, Canada, she holds degrees from McGill University in Montreal and the Wright Institute in Berkeley. She enjoys attending theater and symphony performances and volunteer work, and is an enthusiastic hiker and walker. She is the mother of four children and grandmother of eleven. She lives in San Francisco."
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 28, 2025
Don Asher was a professional musician for his entire adult life, playing piano in night clubs, bars, dives, strip clubs, hotels, dance halls, country clubs - the entire realm of the American popular music scene. Notes from a Battered Grand is his story and it's one unlike any other that I've read about the realm of popular American music that lies outside of the world of the big names (though some of those make appearances here).
It begins, "During the thirties and forties in Worcester, Massachusetts - that dear, drab, redbrick pile that gave you Robert Benchley, S.N. Behrman, Bob Cousy, Abbie Hoffman, and the songwriter-recluse Einar Swan (who died at thirty-six (*), leaving a poignant legacy: "When Your Lover Has Gone") - the most prestigious job for a piano player was the Pollywog Lounge of the Bancroft Hotel."
If that grabs you, this is your book. And it has one of the best book titles that I've come across.
(*) - Wikipedia says that he was thirty seven, but I won't nit-pick. I guess I just did.
A side note: A friend who is a working musician (though he also has a day job) recommended this book to me 30 years ago. When I mentioned it to him recently, he told me that he had lent his copy to a fellow musician (who, incidentally, is good enough and lucky enough to make his living entirely through playing music). He passed that copy on to another musician and it made its way until it disappeared somewhere. My friend ended up buying another copy for himself. (That's why I don't lend copies of my books. I'll give books to people, but I don't lend them, expecting to receive them back.)
Incidentally, Don Asher also co-wrote Hampton Hawes' autobiography, Raise Up Off Me.
It begins, "During the thirties and forties in Worcester, Massachusetts - that dear, drab, redbrick pile that gave you Robert Benchley, S.N. Behrman, Bob Cousy, Abbie Hoffman, and the songwriter-recluse Einar Swan (who died at thirty-six (*), leaving a poignant legacy: "When Your Lover Has Gone") - the most prestigious job for a piano player was the Pollywog Lounge of the Bancroft Hotel."
If that grabs you, this is your book. And it has one of the best book titles that I've come across.
(*) - Wikipedia says that he was thirty seven, but I won't nit-pick. I guess I just did.
A side note: A friend who is a working musician (though he also has a day job) recommended this book to me 30 years ago. When I mentioned it to him recently, he told me that he had lent his copy to a fellow musician (who, incidentally, is good enough and lucky enough to make his living entirely through playing music). He passed that copy on to another musician and it made its way until it disappeared somewhere. My friend ended up buying another copy for himself. (That's why I don't lend copies of my books. I'll give books to people, but I don't lend them, expecting to receive them back.)
Incidentally, Don Asher also co-wrote Hampton Hawes' autobiography, Raise Up Off Me.
February 5, 2013
Laughed a lot reading it... gig stories are always fun...
Thanks Tom S for the book!!
Thanks Tom S for the book!!
December 4, 2024
The memoir of pianist-author Don Asher begins like many musical showbiz memoirs, especially those by children of immigrants whose parents lived in mortal fear of their offspring becoming performers. You can hardly blame the parents. Mass media is mostly a mid-twentieth century creation, and prior to the era of superstars, entertainers didn’t make much money. They were usually itinerants who, when showing up to perform for the quality, tended to enter the big house via the back door.
Asher begins by taking piano lessons to please his mother, especially since the lessons didn’t take for his older brother. Asher discovers an aptitude for ivory tickling, though not really a love for it, not at first at least. That comes later when, in his wanderings through his hometown, he’s exposed to jazz. It’s not that he likes jazz where he didn’t like classical; it’s that jazz opened some kind of portal for the young musician that let him appreciate the music he’d previously found a little too formal and constraining.
Slowly he gets better at his craft, and eventually starts picking up night gigs. From there, he’s off to the races.
The rest of the book charts his experiences as a working musician crisscrossing the country with other peripatetic players. He describes the kinds of hell gigs you would expect a working musician to have to endure. He’s asked to don humiliating costume on theme nights for revelers who basically view him and his cohorts as tuxedoed simians. There are dive bars and, as you’d expect when alcohol is flowing, even some violence.
Asher is a very good writer, with a lively and decorative literary style that no doubt mirrors his style of piano playing. Like jazz music, there’s a freeform and loose quality to the proceedings here. And although I respect bebop (as Dexter Gordon called it), I still can’t really get down with it. Ultimately, while Asher does a good job of capturing the feel of endless nights of grinding gigs—punctuated by brief spurts of unalloyed joy—he also recreates the experience for the reader with painful fidelity. A certain sameness begins to set in, the lack of purpose except for the little joy that can be captured in odd moments, only to be quickly undermined by some caddish partygoer’s crass request or offhandedly belittling comment to the “hired help.”
It's about as authentic as one could hope, but it feels, at least to me, far too long, and if it weren’t for the guy’s linguistic verve it would have eventually gotten to be excruciating, rather than just monotonous.
I’m glad I’m not a musician. Then again, being a small fry writer isn’t exactly any great shakes, either. Still, at least I don’t have to dress up and barely have to interact with anyone at all.
Asher begins by taking piano lessons to please his mother, especially since the lessons didn’t take for his older brother. Asher discovers an aptitude for ivory tickling, though not really a love for it, not at first at least. That comes later when, in his wanderings through his hometown, he’s exposed to jazz. It’s not that he likes jazz where he didn’t like classical; it’s that jazz opened some kind of portal for the young musician that let him appreciate the music he’d previously found a little too formal and constraining.
Slowly he gets better at his craft, and eventually starts picking up night gigs. From there, he’s off to the races.
The rest of the book charts his experiences as a working musician crisscrossing the country with other peripatetic players. He describes the kinds of hell gigs you would expect a working musician to have to endure. He’s asked to don humiliating costume on theme nights for revelers who basically view him and his cohorts as tuxedoed simians. There are dive bars and, as you’d expect when alcohol is flowing, even some violence.
Asher is a very good writer, with a lively and decorative literary style that no doubt mirrors his style of piano playing. Like jazz music, there’s a freeform and loose quality to the proceedings here. And although I respect bebop (as Dexter Gordon called it), I still can’t really get down with it. Ultimately, while Asher does a good job of capturing the feel of endless nights of grinding gigs—punctuated by brief spurts of unalloyed joy—he also recreates the experience for the reader with painful fidelity. A certain sameness begins to set in, the lack of purpose except for the little joy that can be captured in odd moments, only to be quickly undermined by some caddish partygoer’s crass request or offhandedly belittling comment to the “hired help.”
It's about as authentic as one could hope, but it feels, at least to me, far too long, and if it weren’t for the guy’s linguistic verve it would have eventually gotten to be excruciating, rather than just monotonous.
I’m glad I’m not a musician. Then again, being a small fry writer isn’t exactly any great shakes, either. Still, at least I don’t have to dress up and barely have to interact with anyone at all.
November 8, 2008
Simply one of the best books ever written about the life of a working musician. A classic.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews