The Night the Music Will End

At 5 feet, 5 inches, Frank Day isn’t very tall, but when he sits down at the piano, big things happen.

The room suddenly comes alive with the sort of music that makes you want to march, and a dozen voices join in to sing:

Seventy-six trombones led the big parade . . .

There’s a kind of rollicking quality to the session that blends New Year’s Eve with an Irish wake, rattling windows a block away.

It’s been that way almost every weekend since 1968, when Day first sat down at the piano bar in this little Scottish pub called Tam O’Shanter.

He drew a crowd that has clustered around him ever since, singing the old tunes, even trying the new ones, because long before there was karaoke there was Frank Day banging away at the old 88s.

But all that’s going to end Saturday.

After 28 years as the music of the weekend along Los Feliz Boulevard, Day has become a victim of downsizing.

“They told me the entertainment just hasn’t been paying for itself,” he said the other day. “So I guess that’s it.”

Day is 77 but looks years younger, ablaze in a bright red and black Royal Stuart plaid jacket, his mustache bristling, his hair stylishly long.

He pauses to control his emotions as he talks about leaving the Tam, feeling a little like he’s walking away from a family. He’s seen cycles of life revolve around him for three decades and leaving it all will be hard.

There’ll be tears at the piano bar when the music ends.

*

I’m not sure why they’re getting rid of Day. He says they’re bringing in an Irish group to replace him on Friday nights, so bouncing him isn’t going to be that much of a savings.

Neither the manager nor the owner of the place would return my telephone calls,so I couldn’t ask them if they were dumping Day because he’s too old or because his music is out of date.

I’ll grant you he doesn’t play rock or New Wave, but he knows about 800 tunes that everyone seems to love. The guy’s been pounding the piano since he was 5, wandering from one end of the country to the other until he found a home at the Tam O’Shanter.

The night I was there he jumped from “Getting to Know You” to “Clare de Lune” with the seamless grace of a ballerina, either leading the chorus of voices that rose around him or bending into the kind of classical piece that let his piano do the talking.

Anyone could request a tune, and if you wanted to do a solo that was OK too, but you could only do two. “There was no limit at first,” Day says, “but you know, some people just didn’t want to stop singing.”

The only tune he won’t play is “Send In the Clowns,” because it belonged to Day and his wife, Elizabeth, who died in 1983.

They’d been married for 27 years, and she was the only woman he ever loved. Day may give the ladies around the piano bar a hug now and then, but he’s never removed his wedding band and never will.

Isn’t it rich, are we a pair, me here at last on the ground, you in the air . . .

*

I had the feeling as I listened to the music and sipped at a glass of Whitbread Ale that I was in somebody’s living room. We were embraced by an intimacy of sound you don’t find much anymore.

New music isolates and jangles, creating levels of hostility more quickly than war drums. Even the love songs are confrontational.

I’m not saying we all ought to go around humming “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts,” but there should be a place somewhere in a corner of this super-cool city where a little yesterday can exist.

I keep remembering Thanksgivings a long time ago when the kids were young and the family together and we sang ourselves hoarse around a ukulele that my brother-in-law Bob could almost play.

Eddie had the strongest voice, but I tried the hardest and we made one hell of a trio.

Hang down your head, Tom Dooley, hang down your head and cry . . .

There were 20 of us and sometimes we all sang. The music drifts through memory like a ribbon in the wind, fluttering slightly but always there.

It’s all that’s left. Bob is gone, Eddie is old, and just about everyone is someplace else.

Frank Day plays my memories, and I can understand why those who filled the bar of the Tam O’Shanter will miss him. As I looked back at the singers I could see Bob on the uke and hear Eddie’s voice rising.

Oh we ain’t got a barrel of money, maybe we’re ragged and funny . . .

And I saw an image of yesterday, like an old photograph, fade into the cruel obscurity of a downsizing world.

Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com