I don’t believe I am hearing all this from a piano player in a saloon : Night of the Wolf

It was an eerie kind of night, with a wild wind blowin’ down the canyons and a full moon hanging over the Valley like a witch’s eye, pure and cold and ominous.

Stepdaddy used to call it the night of the wolf.

He’d leave the house square-shouldered and straight-backed, a posture left over from his Army days, and come home after midnight, all loose and blurry. When my mother asked him where he’d been, he’d just say prowlin’ and howlin’.

I was thinking about that when I went out wandering into a darkness lit by that cognac-colored moon, looking for sound and movement, looking for music.

That’s how I met Doug Sprague.

I drifted into a place in Van Nuys called the Carriage Inn. It’s a middle-class bar off the San Diego Freeway that caters to the kind of people who shop at K-Mart, which is why I am attracted to it, I guess. Roots.

I am sitting in a booth in a corner feeling oddly detached and dreamlike when the piano begins to play. It’s not a barroom sound but a happy, up-tempo piece like “Zippity Do Dah” or something.

I look over to where the piano is and there is this big, floppy, puppy-dog kind of guy, smiling and pounding away and, so help me God, bobbing his head from side to side. I learn later it’s Sprague.

I am thinking to myself he is like no saloon piano player I have ever seen, certainly nothing like Freeway Freddie up in East Oakland, who always had a tumbler of Rocky Mountain rye next to him and an unfiltered cigarette in his mouth. Everything Freddie played sounded like “The Volga Boatman.”

Sprague is young and clean and so damned happy with life he bounces when he walks.

I am obviously intrigued by this so I introduce myself and offer to buy him a drink.

Sprague not only doesn’t drink, but he also believes in God and is a high priest in the Mormon Church and takes his kid willingly to places like Chuck E. Cheese’s, where the devil waits for grown-ups.

I ask, doesn’t it bother you to be a Mormon and have to play your music for people lapping up gin? No, he says, he loves music and is doing what he wants to do, making someone happy.

I may not believe a guy who tells me his life’s ambition is to be a monk and work with lepers in East Africa because it makes them happy, but I believe Sprague.

Mission permeates his life, and I don’t mean to imply that he is up there trying to turn everyone on to Jesus. He just wants you happy and he works at it beyond tunes like the aforementioned “Zippity,” or maybe “Amazing Grace.”

He can growl out the blues like Satchmo used to and bring old-time stylists like the Big Bopper back to life. You’d swear sometimes too that Fats Domino was in the room, bopping up Blueberry Hill.

Sprague knows about 2,000 tunes by heart and can switch from piano to the Korg synthesizer, sending stabs of electronic lightning into the smoky corners.

Ask him to play “Try to Remember” when the clock gets close to midnight, and even the drunks stop to listen.

He’s been making music since he was 5, playing mostly by ear, with only a brief stop along the way for formal lessons. He reads music, but not too well. Obviously it doesn’t matter.

Here is a guy who radiates music. It glows around him like a soft blue light, and you get the feeling when he’s on a break that he can hardly wait to get back to the keyboard, smiling over the piano past the tip jar, happy as hell, although the metaphor may not fit in this case.

By the way, Sprague doesn’t bait the tip jar like most piano players, which is to say he doesn’t put a couple of bills in himself at the start of the evening so that everyone will get the idea they should tip.

“If they like me,” Sprague says, “they’ll tip me. If they don’t, they shouldn’t.”

“Doug,” I say, intrigued by his purity, “do you ever curse?”

“Nope,” he says, but then he has second thoughts and says, “Hey, I’m not a perfect person. I’m human. I hit my finger with a hammer once and . . . well . . . I came close, you know?”

I make a date to talk to him some more but he says he can’t do it tomorrow because he’s comforting a bereaved church family.

“It’s a difficult time for them,” he says gently, “and they need somebody.”

I don’t believe I am hearing all this from a piano player in a saloon, and I almost laugh out loud to think how Freeway Freddie would take a guy like Doug Sprague. I’ll never know, I guess, because Freddie disappeared in the Estuary about five years ago.

Sprague goes back to the piano and begins to play again. He’s doing “Send in the Clowns” for me on the synthesizer, making it sound like a pan flute, and I figure that’s a good time for me to check out, so I wave and leave.

The wind is still howling down Sepulveda and the witch’s-eye moon stares unblinking from a starry sky when I hit the Ventura, but the restlessness is gone and I drive straight home.

Sprague’s music has soothed my soul. The night of the wolf is over.