For musician/maestro Dick
Bright, two important events occurred early on in his life that immutably
shaped the oddly paved path he would one day find himself traveling.
The first, which took place at the age of seven, was when Bright met
the legendary Los Angeles music teacher Sybil Maxwell and began studying
the violin. "She scared me," he fondly remembers, "but
she got me to take the violin seriously. I immediately planned to become
a world-class symphony player."The second occurrence—a few
years later—was when Bright's parents took him to the showroom
at Harrah's in Lake Tahoe, to see Jack Benny, the famed comedian and
sometime violinist.
"Right then, right
there, Jack Benny showed me that you could play the violin and still
have a sense of humor," says Bright, surrounded by the tiki-room
kitsch that serves as decor in his airy, light-filled home in Marin
County, California, Bright gives his bulldog Addie a vigorous pat, and
offers a big, theatrical
shrug.
Bright’s been walking
that wobbly line ever since, striking that always-precarious balance
between working hard and playing hard, between making serious music
and serious fun. "When I was 12 years old," he says,
"I would only practice the day before my lesson and the day after
my lesson, and just fudge it the rest of the week, but Sybil always
knew. One day she sat me down and said, 'You know what? I have 50 students
half as talented as you who are willing to work four times as hard.
Either start practicing or quit wasting my time!' So I started practicing
hard, four hours a day, every day, and I actually kept that up—till
I went to college, where I discovered girls and rock 'n' roll and parties."
These days, every night's
a party for Dick Bright.
As a musician, he gained
a reputation in the '70s and '80s as the "wacky rock 'n' roll violinist,"
arranging and performing the strings on the Dr. Demento classic "Stairway
to Gilligan's Island," a Led Zeppelin/TV theme parody recorded
by Little Roger & the Goosebumps. Tapping into his serious side,
he began building a first-rate reputation as a solid bandleader, creating
Dick Bright and his Sounds of Delight, moonlighting here and there as
an actor (remember the suspicious waiter during the climactic restaurant
scene in Mrs. Doubtfire? That was Dick Bright). He straightened out
a little when he was hired to lead the band at the fabled Venetian
Room in San Francisco's upscale Fairmont Hotel, where for seven years
his orchestra backed such stars as Ella Fitzgerald, Cab Calloway, James
Brown, B.B. King, and Oscar Peterson. Even then, Bright kept one foot
on the crazy half of the path, hosting his own cartoon show on a local
San Francisco TV station.
Bright found the perfect
blend of his mixed-bag talents when he formed Dick Bright's SRO, an
eccentric 20-piece cover band that performs mainly R&B classics
for major corporate events and enormous parties (like the Mardi Gras
in New Orleans). SRO allows Bright to be a bit strange. "When we
do 'Wild Thing,'" he says, "I come out [as a rapper] with
lots of bad jewelry and a bad jump suit."
The ensemble also incorporates
the violin in a typically peculiar way. "I have a classically trained
trio of female violinists called the Dickettes," he explains. To
stay even closer in touch with his classical side, he has formed a smaller
ensemble, the Dick Bright Orchestra, that allows him to play Bach and
Handel and, in Bright's words, "other light classical favorites."
Bright is a living example
of a string player doing his own thing—and doing it well. As odd
as it sounds, his band has become one of the most sought-after acts
in the corporate world, still traveling the globe to perform for private
parties sponsored by such high-tech giants as Oracle and Sun Microsystems.
"I still don't practice a whole lot," Bright admits with a
laugh. "I can go without practicing for a week and my chops are
still the same." Laughing again, he adds, "Maybe that's just
a sad commentary on my chops."
As much as Bright digs his
big band, his favorite job is one he does all by himself. "I
play the National Anthem for the San Francisco Giants every summer,"
he beams. "That is the coolest gig I do all year. I get to watch
baseball, and I get to do a major violin solo in front of 40,000 people!"
Says Bright, grinning again,
"It's the one gig I do practice for."
Photo of Dick Bright by Rory McNamara
