The Punch Story
Dawn. A station wagon pulls up to the office of an obscure motel in New Jersey. Three men enter—pasty-faced, grim-eyed, silent (for those are their names). Perfect opening shot, before credits, for a really lousy bank-robbery movie? Wrong. The Dave Brubeck Quartet, some years ago, starting our day's work.
Today we have a contract (an offer we should have refused) for two concerts at the Orange County State Fair in Middleton. 2 pm and 8 pm. Brubeck likes to get to the job early.
So we pull up behind this hay truck around noon, finally locating the guy who had signed the contract. Stout, red-necked, gruff and harried (from the old New Jersey law firm of the same name), and clearly more comfortable judging cattle than booking jazz groups, he peers into the station wagon, which contains four musicians, bass, drums, and assorted baggage, and for the first and only time in our seventeen years of wandering about the world, we get this question: "Where's the piano?"
