Play Me a Song, Mister Piano Man

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Talent is a funny thing. Almost everyone has a gift, be it the steady hand of a neurosurgeon or the steel nerves of a master thief. Some of us are good at writing...or starting successful businesses...or hitting a baseball. But far more rare-and, depending on the condition of your noggin, more important-than any of these traits is the ability to sit in a smoky bar at a makeshift piano and work bachelorettes into a frenzy by singing Billy Joel songs. That is the gift of a dueling piano player. 

On any given night, Springfield is lucky enough to have three of these master artists on stage at Ernie Biggs Dueling Piano Bar. You know Ernie Biggs: It's that place your mother bugged you to take her (once); it's the place most of us are talking about when we say "My drunkest night ever began at..."; it's the place any self-respecting Springfield nightlife fan has knocked back a shot or six and sung a the top of his or her lungs. And while the bar is stellar and the clientele fun-loving, the one thing that really sets Ernie Biggs apart is the fact that the piano players practically make us have a good time through sheer force of will.

But how does one wind up choosing "dueling piano player" as a career? (And rest assured, though you'll never find it as an option in a guidance counselor's pamphlet, it IS a career.) The answers are surprisingly...well, normal: dueling piano players are developed by birthright, by career path or by sheer, dumb chance.

The Player in His Prime

Jason Brady always knew he was destined for the music business. The son of a dueling piano player, Jason grew up in Cleveland. He started playing the drums at age three; by eight he hand sent a record for record producer Clive Davis to listen to. Later in life Jason would play in a band that played on the Warped Tour. Despite all that, from a young age, Jason's was groomed to be a dueling pianist.

"Dad needed a partner, so he sat me down on the stool and said 'you wanted to do this, so it's time to learn. Here's Middle C, figure it out," 27-year-old Jason says, laughing. By age 15 he was playing a three-night-a-week professional gig: a dozen years later, he's still doing it.

With two children (one of them born just late last month) Jason lives one of the most domesticated lives you'll find on the dueling piano circuit. Oh, he had his transient years, nine of them to be precise. But when marriage and fatherhood called, he put a stop to the constant traveling and settled down in Boise, Idaho ("a beautiful city," in Jason's words), moving to Springfield about a year ago. He still takes the occasional road trip, often to the other Ernie Biggs location in Little Rock, but spends most of his time as Springfield's de facto "house" player.

"People look at us and are like, 'This can't be your only job'," Jason says between drags on his cigarette. Ernie Biggs is beginning to fill with its usual Thursday-night throng, and Jason and his fellow ivory ticklers are still a few minutes away form taking the stage. "There are only a few hundred people in the world who do this job. Maybe 200-400 people who do this show and do it well."

And how exactly, besides memorizing every song that came out between 1970 and 1995, is one able to do the dueling piano gig well? It's not necessarily through constant practice (altering between talking and singing loudly takes its toll on Jason's voice) but by learning new songs. Jason says he'll download lyrics during the day for a song he'll play that night. And sometimes, he says, a dueling duo that is particularly in sync will take an unknown request and play it for the first time right there on stage.

But a lot of it is repetitive and predictable, too-not that that bums Jason out. "We know that 'Piano Man' is going to get played every night, because [the crowd] wants to hear it," he says. "No matter how much you like or dislike a song...you come to like almost everything you do."

Most of us would need a few stiff drinks to make it through "99 Luftballoons" every night, and Jason says most dueling piano players do drink-though not as much as you might expect. "Most of them know their limitations," he says. "There are few times that -at least at [Ernie Biggs]-that you would even know they had been drinking."

"Some don't even drink. I do," he says, lifting a glass containing something that looks like Red Bull.

With a full weekend of shows about to begin and a week-old infant waiting at home, something with Red Bull would seem to be a fine idea.