Name: Mort Weiss
Age: 71
Wife: Jeanne
Home: Orange County, Calif., and Texas
Current Job: Jazz clarinetist, music store owner, record company founder
Hobbies: Working out, reading particle physics
Past jobs: Soldier, saxophone player, cab driver, Good Humor man
Tell us about your first music career.
In the late '40s or '50s when television was just starting to come out, ... I did a lot of TV. Freddy Martin was a big-band leader, and I was a featured soloist with his band, and the band's singer was a fellow named Merv Griffin. He was working for about $150 a week.
Looking back, I had a lot of gonads for a kid. When that red light came on, nothing was taped. You were in people's living rooms. Boom! There was no margin for error.
What happened then?
That gets me up to 19, and World War Two-and-a-Half was going on, sometimes called Korea. ... So I got drafted.
I learned quite a bit. In fact, I picked up the tenor sax and got into an Army band. I ended up playing a lot of R&B and blues. You can't play modern jazz of any type unless you have an extensive blues background.
You know who Charlie Parker was? One day I heard Charlie Parker on saxophone and that was it. Turned my whole life around. Clarinet was the main instrument during the '40s, the big bands, the Artie Shaws, the Benny Goodmans, and it completely fell out of favor as soon as Charlie Parker hit the scene.
And you enjoyed some success in this new style.
I got involved in playing bands in Vegas. ... It was all show - there wasn't really room to stretch out and play jazz the way one creatively does. But I never stopped practicing the clarinet.
I really fell into the lifestyle. Lifestyle means, "Hey, I just discovered Benzedrine. And it goes great with vodka! You can stay up for three days and party!"
Just to sum it all up, I woke up one day in Parker Center - that's the main jail in downtown Los Angeles - completely naked and in a padded cell. ... It was a big reality check for me.
I don't watch movies like "The Matrix" because those things were going around in my head. I was fleeing from the people that had put chips in my head, and jumping out of my car fleeing the CIA and everything. I found out I was having a complete amphetamine psychosis. That's how far down I got.
And then you ended up with your own business.
Let's jump forward to 1965. Wallach's Music City was a huge chain of record stores. They owned Capitol Records. I went to work for them ... and worked myself into a regional manager of three major stores.
Now I didn't touch the clarinet. I put everything down. I went into this thing, running these stores, and opened my own store, the Sheet Music Shoppe, and it's actually world-renowned. I've had the store in the same place for 26 years.
We deal mainly in print - books, all the school books, the teachers' books, "Teaching Little Fingers to Play" that you probably saw when you were a kid. It's not a sexy industry. It's librarian-type work, especially with popular music.
How did you get back into music?
My wife was in Italy with my stepdaughter, and I got one of these junk-mail things we all throw away, and it said, "Do you want to play jazz?" Kinda caught my eye. There was a community college that was holding auditions for a jazz ensemble. Well, I had 14 days. I took out a clarinet, blew the cobwebs off.
I went to work hard, and 14 days later I went down and auditioned. The professor, a good musician and fairly well-known, was knocked out. I've had a lot of big things happen to me since, but nothing has put me on cloud nine as much as when that guy said, "Wow, you really play good."
The ensemble never worked out - maybe to the best. I knew a lot of major musicians who would come to my store, and I said to some of them, "Hey, let's get together and play a little bit," and they did me a favor and came over. Within five months I put out a CD called "No Place to Hide," with a great guitarist named Ron Eschete. I've got five CDs out, getting acclaimed all over the world from jazz critics - "Where has this person been?"
I've played the best clubs in Hollywood, and that started when I was 69 years old. I started a record company, too. In two months we're building a music school. I guess when you're playing jazz you have to think outside the realm. It's almost like being an entrepreneur. That's kind of the way my whole life has been.
I've actually reached my goal. I could quit right now. I always knew I had a certain gift for playing, but it just wasn't working out with mainstream existence. I was upset with the idea that when I go, no one would know that Mort Weiss passed through.
What kind of life are you leading now, as a musician?
Next week is our 32nd anniversary, and after all these years we're sleeping in separate rooms. ... I have dinner at 1 in the morning and get up at the crack of noon. I'm back to a real musician's schedule.
I have a workout program, doing 2 miles on my treadmill. It really helps. One grows older, one's lung capacity diminishes. I had a hip replacement last year - it's not bad, actually, I'm a little bit hipper than I was.
We've had two yachts. ... I live in a house with a harbor view. We just bought a ranch in Texas. Now, we're talking about from that padded cell. That's why I'm not hesitant to talk about it, because I'm really proud of what I've done.