Life in a Minor Key : At Barbershop Piano, He’s No Longer a Used-Up Alcoholic

In the cruel morning light, the Piano Man looks like a dazed victim--struck down by some runaway baby grand.

His eyes bloodshot, he had awakened inside an abandoned apartment building somewhere in North Hollywood and had walked five miles in the rain, downing two malt liquors to take the edge off his aches. Now his hands are trembling from the booze as he drops his soggy, hand-me-down coat onto the barbershop floor.

The odd gathering of 70-year-old haircut-and-a-shave customers and hip street passersby look on silently, like a symphony orchestra patiently awaiting its maestro.

Finally, Russ Turner pats the top of the century-old, out-of-tune piano. “She’s my sweetheart,” he croaks. “She responds. In tune or out, after you get to know a piano, they do what you ask ‘em.”

Then he plays. Slowly at first, his weathered, discolored hands move across the keyboard, eliciting notes that make the audience smile. Broadway show tunes. Jazz riffs. Classical themes. Rock ‘n’ roll numbers. The blues. Turner plays them all, moving sweetly, effortlessly between selections as varied as night and day, drunk and sober.

And for those brief moments, he is no longer a 42-year-old, used-up alcoholic who looks 25 years older. When the music starts, his scarred forehead held low near the keys, Turner isn’t the sad has-been who boasts that he once played the big time with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Smokey Robinson, Larry Carlton, Joe Sample and Carmen McRae.

He’s the Piano Man.

Inside the usually packed Studio City barbershop, Turner plays for drinks and tips, taking his listeners back to an era when their lives--like his own--were simpler, more melodic.

Most weekday mornings, Turner shows up at the shop near Laurel Canyon and Magnolia boulevards to visit 78-year-old Jim Carcioppolo and his partner, Tom Wilson, 75--two barbers who believe in his talent.

They know Turner as a performing and composing genius waterlogged by years of substance dependency, a child prodigy who toured the world with drummer Buddy Rich and who later became a much-in-demand Los Angeles studio musician.

And they know that now, after years of living the blues of the streets, Turner is once again attempting a comeback, trying to brush aside his hurtful habits like a grandiose hand-sweep down the piano keyboard. With a little help from his friends.

He has the support of people such as jazz vocalist Lainie Kazan, with whom Turner played in the 1970s during the early stages of his personal plummet. Kazan has driven Studio City’s back alleys to offer her former conductor and musical director food, clothing and support.

“I love Russ Turner,” she said. “I prize him for his spirit and his soul. I still play the music he orchestrated for me years ago because it’s the finest work I have in my library.

“It’s broken my heart to have to sit by and watch Russ self-destruct. There are musicians all around the country waiting for Russ Turner to kick his habit and come back to us. We’re waiting with open arms.”

Turner’s friends and family have indeed awaited his second coming--watching him drift through countless alcohol-abuse programs, wandering the streets of Studio City, muttering to himself, composing music in his head as he sat on bus benches. But, for so long, he never played.

Until two years ago, when he wandered into Jim’s and Tom’s barbershop, asking to try out the old Stodard piano that was collecting dust in the corner by the boxes full of swept-up gray hairs.

His music made them weep.

For years, Tom and Jim had cut hair for an increasingly aged clientele--forever talking about the old days, before the Beatles spoiled popular music and the “longhairs” almost drove them out of the barbering business.

Carcioppolo, a Sicilian who learned to play guitar and cut hair in his native Palermo, once headed a group called “I Cinque Italiani”--The Five Italians--who saw their club dates evaporate with the advent of rock ‘n’ roll.

Years later, together with the mustachioed Wilson, a Big-Band and Broadway show tune lover, Carcioppolo listened as Turner lithely fingered the keyboards. And he went back in time.

“Russ played everything, the stuff we listened to when music was really music,” he said. “He brings the good old days back to the shop.”

Soon, customers wanted to know more about the Piano Man. They clamored to hear him play.

Now, appreciative regulars press a folded $5 bill into his hand or run to a nearby convenience store for his favorite brew--a 40-ounce can of St. Ides malt liquor, prized by Turner for its high alcohol content.

On some days, a local bank security guard will drop by with his teen-age friends and Turner will rock them on the piano as the barbers hold their ears in mock insult.

Turner earns his keep in other ways. Each morning, he sweeps up the discarded hair from the previous day’s cuts, maneuvering around seated customers who admire the backs of their heads in the barber’s hand-held mirror, murmuring “Yass, yass, that’s just what I wanted.”

On tours of local dumpsters, scouring recyclable cans to convert to beer money, he collects conversation pieces for the shop--a foot-high Madonna statue, glass-encased rose, plastic Ninja turtle and leather E.T. doll.

There is a bittersweet atmosphere to Turner’s visits. After days on the streets, he reeks of body odor and alcohol, offending some customers. “Sometimes, it’s so bad you can’t stand it,” Wilson said. “But when he plays that piano, it’s a thing to behold.”

So the barbers let Turner return each day, loaning him money and letting him store his meager possessions. They give him old clothes gathered from church collection boxes.

“He’ll wear anything--from pants that are too small to plastic bags during the rain,” Wilson said. “If the shirts don’t fit him, I just slice them up the middle of the back with a pair of scissors and he wears them anyway.”

Turning from his piano, Turner talks ruefully about being a homeless “Mr. Bojangles” few people trust anymore. And about his long-blown chances at major success.

The Austin, Tex., native learned to play piano at the age of 3 in a church basement as his mother attended services. By the age of 12, he had quit school and was living with his father in Pittsburgh--with a court-issued license to play at local bars.

That’s where he met a member of drummer Buddy Rich’s band, who was so impressed with the 15-year-old he invited him to join their tour.

On the road, Turner discovered the dark life of a blues and jazz musician: He experimented with drugs, slept with hookers. And he drank.

By his mid-20s, he was among the most sought-after studio pianists in Los Angeles. There were years of heightened musical creativity, a failed marriage and drug experimentation.

He was this crazy man at the keyboards who affected those around him.

“Russ put me in touch with the blues part of my soul,” Kazan recalls of her relationship with Turner. “Russ just heard things in the music. Maybe it was part of his madness. The man was brilliant, but he could never really be harnessed.”

Once, while performing with Kazan before a packed house in New York, Turner suddenly began wandering the stage, wringing his hands, offering the audience the peace sign.

“I was having a nervous breakdown,” Kazan said. “I shot him this look that said: ‘Please Russ, hold it together. I love you. It’s OK.’ Later, when we got him backstage, he told us that he had an upside-down Martian inside of him, trying to get right side up.”

Over the years, fellow musicians had seen Turner at the local union hall, where he hit them up for cash, promising a soon-to-be-released project. They just shook their heads, knowing that the booze had eroded the man and the talent.

“I’ve told him that nobody’s going to listen to his music as long as he’s in this state,” producer Steve Tyrell said. “You can’t get inside the front door of a record company if you don’t have any clothes or you smell like booze. I think Russ has learned that.”

Recently, Turner met his most-recent chance to get clean. Composer Frank Reid heard him play in the shop and decided to help free the musician bottled inside.

He has seen Turner fail on several attempts to sober up but refuses to quit--recently deciding that taking Pangamic acid pills might sour the musician’s urge for alcohol.

Slowly, like a languid song, Russ Turner’s music is returning. After co-writing several songs for Joanne Grauer, a local jazz vocalist, he and Reid are looking for new projects.

For now, though, Turner sits at the barbershop keyboard, playing songs upon request.

“I’m a piano man,” he says. “It’s what I do best.”