Paper Three, Andrew Damiter

Sorry for the delay. My dad suddenly became very hard to get in contact with.

Reality is a tease. It convinces you that you’re about to have your big break but then snatches opportunity away from you at the last second. My father, Andrew Damiter, is well acquainted with this deceptive practice. At the age of nine he began playing the accordion, and when he picked up the guitar and began fiddling with the piano it became music was there to stay. He had more than one opportunity to take his musical career to the next level, but there was always some uncontrollable force pushing him away.

College is where the ups and downs began. He enrolled at Bloomsburg University in northeastern Pennsylvania in the late '60s, where he joined a chapter of the Alpha Phi Omega fraternity. Being a service-oriented organization, he thought it would look good on a resume. One of the things the group did was organize a concert twice a year. Their main job was to provide accommodations for whatever group was coming in, however odd the requests might be. Mallow, Carlos Santana’s brother’s group, wanted jugs of water and melon strips backstage, and so that’s what they got. Other groups that passed through included Bread, The James Gang, Billy Preston and Grand Funk Railroad.

“People would say, ‘Wow, you were around some pretty amazing people,’” he said. “At the time you were just putting on a show.” Putting on a show was something he was more than accustomed to doing, as every weekend he traveled home to play with a club group for $18 a gig. But when college ended, the playing and the elbow rubbing ended as well.

Everyone from his parents down to his then fiancé told him it was time to grow up and get a “real” job, and so he was essentially forbidden to continue pursuing music as a career. “Those were my fragmented years,” he said. “My equipment sat and I didn’t do anything. I left it setup in my parents’ basement and I would go down and fool around, but that was it.”

But their warnings wouldn’t stick. At the time he was working as a mixer in a bakery, and some of the guys he worked with played in a band together. Eventually they convinced him to play with them for a summer, and so he dusted off the keyboard and played without telling his fiancé. He was glad to be playing again, but on the downside he was plagued by the fact that the group was nothing short of terrible. People liked them, but they were not capable musicians. Because of this he left not long after joining, which turned out to be a costly mistake.

Singer Freddy Fender came to Scranton, Pa., which was near where said terrible band played. Fender’s band had just quit on him and he was looking to piece together a new one for a gig. He contacted the local musician’s union and, lo and behold, the only band available on short notice was the gang of bakery mixers. They performed and they killed. They did so well that Fender kept them and took them on a tour through Las Vegas. My dad? He had already quit.

Things went on ice again during the late ‘70s. His fiancé moved away, ending that relationship, and he couldn’t find anyone decent to play with. Most of his free time was spent supporting his brother, Ted, who at the time was pitching in the Mets’s farm system. Another possible break wouldn’t come until the early ‘80s when he hooked up with a group called Eddie. They spent more than a year preparing a show for Atlantic City, N.J. clubs. They pieced together a solid group and painstakingly crafted a recording to promote themselves. During this time my dad had a few more celebrity encounters, one of which was Bruce Springsteen’s bass player Garry Tallent.

In the end it wasn’t meant to be. Two of the band’s members were working in New York crafting commercial jingles, and they wanted gigs to start immediately or they weren’t interested. The clubs wanted them in two months. That was too long, and so the two members quit. Club owners weren’t interested in a restructured band, and so if they wanted any jobs they would have to start from scratch. This was not something my dad was interested in doing.

In 1983 he joined what he considered to be his first real band. They went by the name of Splash, and it was the first time my dad felt that he was playing with serious musicians and not just people that played as a hobby. They played very technical, non dance-oriented music, which was what eventually did them in.

“We did a lot of intricate standing around music,” he said. “You could stand there and play something that took eight hours to compose, or you could play some old-timey stuff and people would get out and dance. People wanted to dance.”

By 1984 he had my birth to deal with along with two marriage-inherited step children and their aggravating father. Along with his own emotional stress, other members of Splash began to lose interest and devote themselves to other things, and so the group disbanded. In late ’84 he bounced between two original material groups in New York, neither of which took off.

He recalls it as a unique experience, as he had to stand on the street and pass out fliers and sometimes even money to get people to come to shows. At different times he even bumped into celebrities, including The Young Rascal’s organist Felix Cavaliere and singer Cindi Lauper. Still, it was ultimately a waste of time.

By this point dream chasing was no longer a feasible option, and so he went to a local agency and got hooked up with a group that played hotel lounges and private parties in New York and New Jersey. He spent four or five nights a week traveling in and out of cities and was amazed when he noticed his income had doubled. He wouldn’t get home until four in the morning, but he couldn’t pass up the extra money.

But even this wouldn’t last, as a retooling of DUI laws increased police presence around clubs and began to deplete attendance numbers. Weekly jobs shrank from five to one. New Jersey taxes were going up. It was time to get out. He found a resort band in the Poconos and soon enough picked up the family and moved to Saylorsburg, Pa. Things were looking up.

December 30, 1986. Sometimes things happen that you just can’t predict. My dad had an accident with a circular saw, leaving his right hand severely damaged. Doctors told him he would never be able to play piano again. This not being an option, he began auditioning for groups by the following spring.

“My right hand looked like something out of a war zone,” he said. “I lied and I cheated. I had no shame at all. I went out and I played. I had two fingers on my right hand that I couldn’t feel.”

A tendon transfer a few months later improved things, but his hand was never the same. He was still good at what he did, so he wasn’t questioned. He bounced around a bit before landing with The Gerard Mayer Show Band in 1989, a group he continues to play with to this day. He continued to audition for other groups, but the money was never good enough. In 2004 he began a stint with Twitty Fever, a Conway Twitty cover group that played local fairs, but that became stale after two years.

Just a few weeks ago he auditioned for a spot with up-and-coming country singer Sharon Elaine. He got the job, but ultimately turned it down since there was no immediate guarantee of decent money and he couldn’t afford to take that risk. The time to gamble on a musical breakthrough has long passed. Pipe dreams are no longer on the drawing board.

Now, at 54, he dutifully plods along, content to come home after a long day teaching elementary history to play two or three nights a week and the occasional weekend party. Not everyone gets their break, but then again not everyone learns to make the most of what they’re given. To say raising a stable family and overcoming fierce adversity is not a significant accomplishment would not be doing him justice.