I had come to be known as the class clown--more because I loved to tell jokes and make people laugh than for any other reason. One day in the new school, a friend told me about another student who was also very funny and arranged a meeting. I was a bit wary aft first. Bit when I did meet Kerry Wade, we clicked immediately and became fast friends.

Kerry was the youngest of two brothers, the oldest of which had graduated from college and had majored in music and got a Ph.D. in psychology. His father was fairly well-off and provided Kerry with a lot of things that fed his interests. One of Kerry's passions was the Marx brothers. His parent could afford a rooftop TV aerial (back before cable), and could pull in WGN from Chicago, which ran old movies. Kerry also had a reel-to-reel tape recorder and had taped all the Marx brothers films.

From Kerry, I learned the genius of the one-liner, the smart-alecky remark, the double entendre, and the prat-fall. Though I never actually saw any of the films until college, I knew most of Groucho's best lines by heart.

Kerry loved sports cars and was also a gifted painter. We would pour over classic car books in the library and he once gave me a small book of the works of Chagall, who was one of his idols. My gimmick was to wear an old-fashioned tie (which I inherited from my grandfather) to school every day. Once, Kerry made a neck-tie for me on which he had drawn a picture of Harpo Marx ogling a set of legs, a soup stain with alphabet noodles glued on, and a picture of me driving my favorite car, an MGB TD.

Classical albums graced Kerry's record collection, but he was more proud of his set of comedy records. While visiting his house one day, he showed me his latest possession--an odd-looking wind instrument. When I blew in it, it sounded like a duck. He laughed and told me it was a bagpipe without the bags and was used for learning the fingering. He took it apart and showed me how the double reed was actually in a chamber inside of the instrument. Kerry told me he was learning to play it.

"Why?" I asked. "So I can play this," he said, taking an album from the shelf and cueing it up. It turned out to be the Peter Schickele's (AKA P.D.Q. Bach) Sinfonia Concertante and when he played it I was captured by a brief but beautiful melody wheezed out by a bagpipe playing with a chamber orchestra.

Kerry had two albums by the professor, one of which spoofed a small classical radio station (Double U, Double O Eff) in Hoople, a mythical town in southern North Dakota. Schickele had a kind of Marx brother-type sense of humor which he grafted onto his skills as a composer by adopting the persona of P.D.Q Bach, "the last but least of J.S. Bach's twenty-odd children." He had graduated from Julliard and wrote a number of songs for Joan Baez and the score for Oh Calcutta! the first nude musical. His compositions were full of musical jokes and awful puns, plagiarized famous works (the Quodlibet), satirized "serious" opera (Cantata: Iphigenia in Brooklyn), and he gave concerts full of slapstick and visual jokes (on instruments of his own invention like the left-handed sewer flute.)

Peter Schickele enjoyed a bit of fame several years ago on public radio with his show "Schickele Mix," but back in the 60s in Indiana, Kerry and I were the only ones who had ever heard of him. Kerry lives in Oregon now and creates fantastic furniture in an old school that he bought and turned into his studio. I am eternally grateful to him, and I would never reverse the change in schools which brought us together.

Schickele Bio
P.D.Q. Bach Bio
Recording

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