It took a call from David Letterman to bring the St. Luke’s Lutheran Church bottle band out of its year-and-a-half hiatus. But the bottle band that had Letterman’s audience cheering in appreciation on Dec. 23 didn’t look much like the band that has played to sellout crowds in a gymnasium at the Park Ridge church for the last 17 years.
The 27 band members who made the trip to New York had to leave their yellow leisure suits and kazoos at home. Their funky costumes and funny song parodies didn’t make it to the national stage. Letterman’s producers said they wanted the band to play it straight, at least as straight as you can be when you’re plucking, hitting and blowing into bottles as your head bobs up and down. So everybody wore black formal wear and serious expressions for the “Late Night” show.
“It worked out fine, but that wasn’t really us,” says Park Ridge resident Kyle Cartwright, one of the original band members, along with her husband, Gary. “People who were used to seeing us kind of went, `Oh?’ “
Cartwright usually plays a character she calls Betty Sue Lou Phlegming, who sings, plays kazoo and sits on audience members’ laps.
What the band did bring to New York was its unusual music, which stood alone quite nicely, at least according to “Late Night” band director Paul Schaeffer. After the show was over, Schaeffer called the performance “amazing” and peppered the band with questions about their instruments.
Paul Phillips of Forest Park founded the bottle band in 1979, and he has been both the comedic and musical backbone of the group ever since. Phillips is accustomed to reactions like the one the band received on “Late Night.”
“What’s most rewarding is when people come to a show and they’re envisioning something corny and not all that exciting,” Phillips says. “They don’t really grasp it, and then when they see it, they’re amazed. This isn’t just banging on bottles.”
Indeed, more than half of the band members have some musical training. There are two who have doctorates in music, and Phillips plays trombone and piano. He got the idea for the band when a similar group (now disbanded) from an Arlington Heights church came to St. Luke’s to blow bottles. We can do that, thought some St. Luke’s choir members, and they did, putting together a bottle band act for a church variety show. That grew into a full show.
“After five years,” Cartwright says, “we were selling out 1,500 tickets before the seats even went on sale.”
Phillips takes several months to put new shows together, composing song parodies such as “Baroque ‘n’ Bottles” and “I’m Forever Blowing Bottles” and writing the musical notations for each player.
“Paul is incredible,” Cartwright says. “Every song has a gimmick. He writes the parodies and then when we get together, everyone starts throwing in ideas of their own. Nothing is ever too much or too big, and we just keep going until it’s over the top.
“It’s mostly for laughs, but bottles can sound very beautiful too.”
The band typically does one show a year, but that includes five performances to satisfy the demand for tickets.
There was no show in 1996 because Phillips, who used to perform with a Chicago improvisation troupe, was too busy to write one. He went back to school in the late 1980s, getting a degree in communications from DePaul University. He so enjoyed his biblical studies classes at DePaul that he’s now a third-year seminary student at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago.
Phillips is doing an internship at Redeemer Lutheran Church in Park Ridge. “It’s one of those things in life you can’t totally comprehend,” he says of his midlife move into the seminary.
He hopes to continue to have time for the bottle band, which performed a fundraising concert at Redeemer Lutheran Feb. 9 and is considering a spring concert at St. Luke’s, which doesn’t officially sponsor the band.
The only way to get into the band these days is to be born into it or to marry into it, as Robert Vela did. When Robert married band member Sonia Olsson last March, the bottle band played a classical music piece from the choir loft during the ceremony.
“All the guests thought it was amazing,” says Robert of Des Plaines. “It sounded beautiful.” Robert has been a devoted follower of the band ever since, and it paid off in January, when Paul asked him if he wanted to become a band member.
“This is a great honor,” says the perfectly serious Robert, who is waiting to find out if he’ll be a blower, hitter or plucker. “I’ll do whatever they need me to do.”
Band members tyypically have five bottles apiece, epoxied together and filled to various levels with water. Before rehearsals and shows the bottles are tuned with an electronic tuner by adding water with a turkey baster or sipping it out with a straw until the bottle produces the desired note.
Hitters use small mallets to tap the bottles. Blowers have the more taxing job of puffing over the tops.
“We joke that one of the job hazards is hyperventilating,” says veteran blower Sandra Werner, a Park Ridge resident who teaches 4th grade in Mt. Prospect. During the parody of “Stars and Stripes,” air masks drop from the ceiling as winded players puff their final notes.
Park Ridge resident Burton Olsson is an engineer by trade and a veteran plucker. When a plucker pulls his or her index finger out of the neck of the bottle, it makes a popping sound. The key here, Olsson says, is getting the right-sized bottle tops. Foreign beer bottles with their narrow tops usually work best. “Your finger has to fit just right, and you have to have your nails trimmed down,” he says.
Phillips uses standard musical notations to write out the notes. For players who don’t read music, the bottles are labeled with numbers that correspond to numbers on the sheet music.
As word of the bottle band spread throughout the 1980s, it was featured on a local CBS News segment, on Channel 11’s “Wild Chicago” and then on the “Jenny Jones Show.” A year ago, when Jay Leno brought his show to Chicago, producers contacted the band and considered them for a spot. They didn’t make the final cut though.
It was “Wild Chicago” that sent a tape to Letterman, whose producers offered to bring 20 of the band members to New York for the Dec. 23 show. The band didn’t want to leave anyone out, so it paid the way for the rest of its musicians.
The group members set out for New York with their bottles encased in bubble wrap inside their carry-on luggage. They filled the bottles in their hotel bathtubs, then practiced in the hotel and at an afternoon rehearsal at the Ed Sullivan Theater before the taping. They’d had two rehearsals in Chicago before they left town.
The original plan called for Letterman to interview Phillips’ 81-year-old mother, Doris, another original band member. But after segments with John Travolta and Julianna Margulies, time was running out and the interview was cut, as was any substantial introduction. At one point, Letterman said the band was from “a town in Illinois the name of which we don’t know at this point.” He never mentioned Park Ridge and never talked to band members.
Still, they got to play their short renditions of “Jingle Bells,” “Deck the Halls” and “White Christmas,” and one band member heard the stage manager say afterwards that their act was the best thing that had been on the show in weeks.
“There hasn’t been a lot of response to the show like I thought there might be,” Phillips says. “I was expecting kind of loony things like, `Can you play at our convention?’ “
So the bottle band most likely will continue just as it has, doing church concerts and occasional outside gigs. “We’ve played for the Association of American Lutheran Church Musicians in Atlanta, we went to Door County (Wis.) to play one year . . . little trips like that,” Phillips says. “They’re fun, so we’d like to keep doing that.
“I never set out with any vision for this. It just multiplied and I just keep going with it. Who knows what’s next?”
