On the day after I started teaching piano again following a long break, a mutual friend, LIsa Wyatt Calamia, saw my post about it and asked me if I knew that Miller Goodman had recently died. (Thanks, Lisa, for letting me know.) Earl Miller Goodman (or Earl, as my family knew him) was the man who taught me piano from age 10 to 15. But he was a lot more than a teacher and he continued helping me long after our lessons were done. He was a mentor. Thats what Lisa said about him today, too. He was such a talented, good and giving person, he was probably a mentor and a role model to many people besides us. Earl was born into a musical family. He sang with them onstage from a very young age, and when he got older and started his own family, he and his wife played gigs together, too. Later they added their son, Nathan, on the drums. I used to go see them play on my days off. He recorded at least one original Christian pop album with his wife, before that genre really broke out. I still have that album. My parents loved Earl because he was a nice person and he knew his stuff. I loved him, not only because he was in the music business, but more importantly because treated me like friend and like a man. I was 10 years old when we met. He never talked down to me. And he, like my parents, encouraged me to play piano, get onstage, entertain, record and write music. He believed in me. As I try to write down everything that Earl ever did for me, I keep having to stop typing and just sit here and sob. Its probably hard to picture this, because people who knew my dad would probably agree that I had the best dad a kid could ever ask for. And yet Earl was like a 2nd excellent father to me. In addition to teaching me piano, he taught my brother Joe and me guitar. He had a 4-track, reel-to-reel recording studio in his house. My youngest brother Rob and I would record demos of my songs there to flesh them out so we could decide which ones to play in our 4-brother band, which at that time was known as, The Caruso Brothers. He helped us buy music equipment. He subscribed to catalogs from a mail-order company called Carvin. That was where he got his own P.A., so we bought a Carvin system for our first one too. (If we played your wedding in the late 70s and early 80s, we probably played through that P.A. system.) As I started to write my own songs, Earl helped me learn to learn music notation. He and my dad helped me get the copyright for my first song. Then came our early records. I wrote the songs and Earl recorded the first 3 singles right at his house. One of them was my senior class song. But before I was a senior, I also sang an original song I wrote on spec for a high school talent show called All Stars. (Thanks to Teacher and Director Mr. Hamilton, I had the honor of walking out at the close of each performance and singing it against the backing track Earl had prepared for me. Once I was in college, I taught piano to pay my own way for almost every class I took. Earl was the one who helped me get started as a teacher. Later, at one of the piano recitals I held for my students, I wanted to let the kids see that I was a student too, so I invited my own teacher, Earl, to come to the recital. After all the kids were done playing their songs, I introduced him as my piano teacher and we used two separate keyboard setups and a drum machine to sing and play the Paul McCartney - Stevie Wonder duet, Ebony and Ivory, which was a big hit at the time. Around the late 80s, Rachel called me to tell me that she and Earl were moving out of state and that I should get over there and see my friend at this little going away party they were having. I just watched a short video clip of me giving him a present of an inflatable keyboard, with Rachel photobombing us from behind. I told him briefly how much he meant to me, until the cameraman broke it off as if I was being too sentimental. Guess Ive said it all here. Ill miss you, my teacher and my friend! Dave
Posted on: Wed, 06 Aug 2014 19:24:32 +0000
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