The Kazoo

(from 2012)

Once or twice a month, and more so on vacation, we tend to gravitate towards the local folk clubs and – er – sing. This post is about how Occasional tried to increase his limited repertoire by mastering the technique of the Kazoo.

For the uninitiated in Kazoo-lore, you have to go back in Britain to a time to when toilet paper wasn’t soft, but hard shiny sheets. If you placed one of those sheets over a comb and hummed through it, you produced a sound. It did something strange to your lips, akin to them going numb, but well – it was a sound.  A Kazoo works on the same principle; it’s an instrument for those who can’t play instruments.

For many of my songs at folk clubs, I can plunk along on my baritone ukulele while singing, but they do require an instrumental break in the middle. A proper musician would do a show-off finger picking routine before returning to vocals. I can only strum, so a Kazoo seemed to be the answer.

The trouble was, you can’t actually sing with a Kazoo in your mouth – at least I can’t – and when it got to the break, I needed to get the thing into my mouth. The first time I grabbed it from the table, hardly missed a strum, stuck it in my mouth and blew. The wretched thing immediately shot out of my mouth across the room and hit the beer glass of a doleful man who had regaled us with a 28 verse long death ballad.

So in the interests of the current British obsession with Health and Safety I determined to fashion a Kazoo holder. You may remember seeing Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen do their asthmatic harmonica stuff using a special harmonica cradle in front of them. But I saw on YouTube how it was possible to make a Kazoo holder from a wire coat hanger. You twisted off the end, made a shape around your neck, stuck the two sharp ends into the end of the Kazoo – it was that easy.

They lied.

First, coat hangers may appear to bend but it is very hard to get them to bend the way you want them to. The first real concern just placing it around your neck is to avoid putting out your eye. Then you have to fix the Kazoo into the contraption so that it stays put and doesn’t swivel upside down. And then you have to try and play the thing. For some reason it becomes a variant replay on the Greek myth of Sisyphus, the King who forever failed in his attempt to roll a boulder up a hill. As you stretch out to grab the thing – without missing a beat – somehow the movements affect the improvised holder so that the Kazoo itself just shifts imperceptibly out of reach. You carry on playing your G, C and D7 as if that’s what you intended all along between verses, while chasing a wretched piece of metal piping around your upper chest. By the time you reach it, laughter (your own) has taken over, and that tragic hymn to the human condition with which you were hoping to reduce an audience to tears has been well and truly trashed.

We finally hit upon a solution involving Mrs Occasional. The first step was winding masking tape around the mouthpiece, the sort of stuff used in decorating and electrical work. It doesn’t exactly taste too good, but it does allow a normal sized mouth to hold onto the thing for as long as the instrumental break might last.

At the key second Mrs O picked the Kazoo off the table and rammed it into my teeth. She then burst out laughing. Mrs O sometimes appears to lack all sense of occasion. So I do the break with the nifty blues chords, and then I am imploring her with my eyes, and a subtlety in the notes blown that she really needs to rescue it again. Please... Sometime before the end of the evening, preferably NOW... Spitting it out onto the floor has a certain commonness about it.

So we are still working on it. I’ve tried to get Mrs Occasional to play the Kazoo instead of me, but so far she has politely declined. I mean, I help put her off with my harmonies, and thump my leg unrhythmically during her solos, but there seems a sad lack of goodwill and cooperation from her side.

And to think that folk music was all about peace and love and changing the world.