REBROADCAST: An inside look at accordions and what it takes to repair them

We revisit a conversation we first aired in April 2023 which was the first installment of our series on people’s professions. We’ll learn what it takes to do different kinds of jobs and how these professions change us.

David Beer is Portland’s Squeezebox Surgeon. He has studied the inner workings of accordions in Italy and at A World of Accordions Museum in Wisconsin. He operates on all different kinds of free reed instruments. He shares with us how he got into this business and gives us an inside look of how accordions work and what it takes to get them singing again.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We end today with the next installment of our new series of conversations about people’s jobs. We’re talking about all kinds of professions with a focus on what it takes for people to do their work; the skills, the craft, the tools, but also how folks end up in their jobs and how these jobs can change us. Today’s installment is a kind of niche within a niche. David Beer is a repair person who focuses specifically on accordions. He calls himself the Squeezebox Surgeon. We visited him last week in his tidy Southeast Portland workshop. I started by asking how he got interested in fixing accordions.

David Beer: I’ve tinkered around with an accordion for a really, really long time. Found one when I was like 20, and mainly just wanted to learn how to fix it for myself, realized I couldn’t really figure it out, and kept trying over and over again. I worked in restaurants pretty much my whole life. And I was trying to get out of restaurants and found first a school that was doing a nine month program in Superior, Wisconsin and they weren’t doing the program anymore, but they were doing shorter courses.

Miller: There had been a nine month course.

Beer: Yeah, she did a full credited program.

Miller: And then it just, she closed it down because there weren’t enough students?

Beer: Yeah. That was part of it. It was hard to get people that would go the whole way through it.

Miller: But you had been interested in that, you were, as part of the plan to transition out of restaurant work, you thought, I’m gonna get the license.

Beer: Totally. Yeah. And I was like, this will be perfect. This will be my way out, if I can just figure out how to afford to go back to school for nine months.

Miller: So, but that wasn’t an option, right?

Beer: Right.

Miller: So what was?

Beer: What happened, I was working at a restaurant and had just left and was on a vacation, visiting my family down in Arizona, my parents in Arizona and had been following the website and checking up on it for the museum in Wisconsin over and over again, and she posted a short intro course. I think it was like six or seven days long and I jumped on it. It was like, it was limited to like five people and I got in, which was great.

Miller: Because, and that was possible and probably more affordable than, than nine months.

Beer: Totally. And it didn’t give me near enough information, but it gave me enough information to know that I was still very much interested and that I needed to find out more.

Miller: But I feel like I’m still missing some details here. So what was it, because if you didn’t want to spend the rest of your life working in restaurants, I imagine there are some variety of other directions you could go. But deciding you want to fix accordions is a really specific direction.

Beer: Right.

Miller: What was it about fixing accordions that made you think, ‘This is what I want to do’?

Beer: I think it was a couple of different things. One, I’ve always loved accordions. I love the way they sound. And it’s funny that people talk about music striking a chord inside you. But it’s like the sound of an accordion does that for me, more than any other instrument. It’s like I feel it.

Miller: You’ve been doing it for a while.

Beer: Yeah. Yeah. Since I was young.

Miller: Do you remember the first time you heard an accordion?

Beer: No, I don’t, which is weird. But I do remember like being surrounded by polka music and stuff as a child in the Midwest and when I was living in Minneapolis, in the early ‘80s, going to a lot of punk shows and staying up late a lot, but also sneaking into the church basements in North Minneapolis and watching the polka bands and the old couples dancing around to polka music.

Miller: How old were you when you were both going to punk shows and sneaking in to see old people dance?

Beer: Probably early twenties. Yeah. And Minneapolis in the ‘80s was pretty heavy in the independent music scene. I mean, Husker Du, and the Replacements, and lots of other bands. So, yeah, there was, it was interesting to have that much variety.

Miller: And you soaked in all of it. Did you think, ‘I want to play the accordion. This is an instrument that gives me joy. It strikes a chord in me, for some reason, I want to play it’?

Beer: Yeah, a little bit. Yeah, and I also couldn’t afford it, and also didn’t know how to find out how to learn how to play one and stuff, but I found one in the garage, and that’s when I found the one in the garage sale and ended up carrying it around thinking, ‘I will learn how to fix it and then I will teach myself how to play.’

Miller: Step one, fix this broken accordion. Step two, learn how to play it. I’ve heard that for you personally, there’s a connection between playing accordion and stopping smoking.

Beer: Yeah.

Miller: What’s the connection?

Beer: So I had carried that accordion around for the majority of my life.

Miller: The one you got in your twenties?

Beer: Yeah, exactly, and then moved to Portland in ‘99 was going to try and quit smoking again, for who knows which time that one was. I’m like, I’m working part time and I don’t have much to do and I have this accordion. So maybe if I’m playing accordion when, instead of smoking, that’ll help. So I found the teacher Luigi Rangan, who died a while ago, but he was a great teacher. He laughed at my broken accordion and made me go buy a new one. Not brand new, of course. But yeah, I took lessons from him for a long time, off and on. And at that time, I did quit smoking, which is nice.

Miller: Because it was something you do with your hands?

Beer: Yeah, exactly. It’s like I want a cigarette, so I’ll go down to the basement and try to play accordion for a little bit.

Miller: Were you also doing restaurant jobs then?

Beer: Yeah.

Miller: Because I imagine you couldn’t just take an accordion break. I mean, you weren’t bringing your accordion to work?

Beer: No, actually at that time I had started my own chocolate business. So I was working from home.

Miller: So you could, and when you have a craving you would just play a little bit of a polka?

Beer: Yeah. Normally not polkas. But, yeah, I like polkas, but they’re not my favorites.

Miller: And so, you tried to fix that first one up?

Beer: Oh, yeah, a bunch of times.

Miller: What made it hard? Maybe the question is what didn’t.

Beer: What didn’t is a good question. What didn’t make it hard was some of it, the physicality of things were easy to figure out, like I could tell where gaskets were on things and could tell when things were leaking because of screws or some of the mechanical stuff I could pick up pretty easily. But a lot of the other stuff I couldn’t, like, I had no idea at that time what was holding all the reeds down to the reedblock was beeswax, and that’s why I couldn’t figure out how to make them stay back on.

Miller: Literally beeswax?

Beer: Yeah, it’s beeswax mixed with Rosin for the most part.

Miller: And that’s what, that’s what holds the reeds on?

Beer: On most accordions, yeah.

Miller: Why?

Beer: It provides a really good airtight seal, a good sonic solid grounding to the reedblock, so you get a good vibration going through. And it’s also very easy to take the reed off and put it back on. It’s messy sometimes. If the wax is new enough, you can just soften it up and pull it off and get it back on and reheat the wax and get it to work. But a lot of times you have to clean off all the old wax and then re-wax it with new wax.

Miller: So that was just one of the things that you didn’t know when you got this old accordion. What makes an accordion a challenging machine to keep running or to fix up?

Beer: For one, there’s a couple thousand parts in them.

Miller: Literally thousands of parts?

Beer: Yeah, totally.

Miller: Like this, so we have one right in front of us here.

Beer: That’s a small one, yeah.

Miller: It says Universe; Universal, but the A and the L have fallen off. Universe actually sounds sort of fun too.

Beer: It’s fun sometimes how they end up changed.

Miller: So is this, I mean, is this a good example of one to show us the workings of an accordion?

Beer: Yeah, I think so. It’s a pretty basic piano accordion, a 120 bass. This is the bass side. It has 120 buttons. A full size keyboard or a full length keyboard on the top, but it’s got narrower keys. It’s a Student or sometimes called a Ladies Model, which I don’t like, but Student, so it’s a little, the keys are a lot closer together. Some of the other ones have much bigger keys.

Miller: Is this one that a client dropped off for you to fix up?

Beer: Totally. He also dropped off two really nice accordions and this one is definitely a lower end one. But it’s the one he learned on as a kid and he wants to fix it up so his kid can learn on it.

Miller: All right. So, he brought it in, and did he know what was wrong with it?

Beer: He knew a few things. He knew that it had some air leaks, which I did find a couple, there’s some loose screws and between the bellows and the body of the accordion, on both sides, there’s gaskets and those gaskets are leaking and need to be replaced. Some of the other things he knew is the register switches are really sticky. These control the voices on the piano side. This one has two voices, an octave apart. There’s a low octave and a high octave and so you can play both or one or the other at a time.

Miller: How long might it take you to do the work on this? This seems like maybe not the biggest job.

Beer: No, not too big. Probably six hours total, I thought. Four to six, depending on some of the things I haven’t checked out completely. So, it might take a little bit longer.

Miller: Could we hear a little bit?

Beer: Sure. That should be with both voices on this side.

[Accordion playing…]

Beer: There’s a bad sounding one.

Miller: So, there’s a buzz there.

Beer: Yeah, definitely.

Miller: When you hear that buzz, do you know that’s something you’re gonna have to look into?

Beer: Yeah, it’s probably a reed out of alignment. The reeds are metal reeds. It’s a free reed instrument. So it’s mounted on one end of the reed and then the reed vibrates in the channel and it’s out of alignment a little bit. So it’s hitting the side of the channel. There’s also some other weird noises, I noticed.

[Accordion playing…]

Like this one, it takes a little bit longer to sound. And some of them have this weird, like gurgly sound, sometimes when you play soft, and those are valves that are loose.

[Accordion playing…]

Yeah, it’s got a few valves loose. It sounds like it’s just service stuff, basically. The valves end up curling if they sit a long time, which I can pop it open and show you what the reeds look like.

Miller: Yeah. So this one I can see the back and it says, “Made in Italy,” serial number 2139. When do you think this was made?

Beer: This one I’m guessing is probably ‘60s. They’re kind of picked by style. They aren’t really marked by dates usually. So, yeah, you kind of have to guess by the style unless you know what time, what period the manufacturer was in business.

Miller: So it’s, what, 60 or 70 years old at this point?

Beer: Yeah, which also means that the wax that’s holding in the reeds is probably hitting that age where, depending on how well it’s been stored and how nice the wax was to begin with, it may be starting to get brittle and may be to a point where it needs to be completely rewaxed.

Miller: So there are bees, right now, that are making wax for new accordions?

Beer: Oh, totally, yeah. They’re special bees. [Laughter]

Miller: I would have believed that. I’m in an accordion shop, so I’ve suspended a lot of ideas I might otherwise have had about journalistic rigor.

Beer: I will make things up.

Miller: So the top is off and it now is in two halves.

Beer: Right.

Miller: Oh, it almost looks like they are, in this half, in the piano side that had the ones that look like piano keys, it’s as if it’s sort of like a xylophone; three, double-sided xylophones.

Beer: Yeah, kind of. Yeah, it’s the reed tongues that are in there [they] kind of do look like that. Yeah, I never thought about it that way. Oh, and here’s some of the loose valves I was talking about, just kind of laying in there.

Miller: There are, are those pieces of wood?

Beer: They’re pieces of leather.

Miller: I didn’t see that coming. This is not a vegan instrument.

Beer: Oh, God, no. Somebody asked me that once, what it would take to make a vegan accordion.

Miller: That’s a very Portland question.

Beer: Yeah, because it was in Portland where I got asked that.

Miller: It has beeswax and leather. Any other animal products?

Beer: Well, on the older ones, hide glue, that’s hide glue that’s holding it together or that’s been used as glue.

Miller: I mean, it’s not like string instruments with catgut are particularly animal friendly, either. And the air is supposed to go through, what happens if you just sort of move it with your fingers?

Beer: On each side, there’s a reed.

[Clinks and buzzing]

Oh, there’s the one that was buzzing. It’s just out of alignment, hitting on the side.

Miller: So, how would you fix that one?

Beer: That one, here, I’ll put down the tables which makes it a little easier to tell what it’s doing.

Miller: That wasn’t subtle.

Beer: No.

Miller: I think even I could see that there was something. Oh, so you have a bellows on your workbench, where you can force air in or out.

Beer: Right.

Miller: Through this reedblock as if it were in the accordion.

Beer: Yeah, which makes it a lot easier to do testing on things like this instead of having to do it inside the accordion.

Miller: And you can force it just through one of the holes.

Beer: Right.

Miller: Ok. So, can we hear the problem again, then?

Beer: Yeah, I think it was this one.

[Accordion noises]

Yeah, there it is. There. And what’s wrong is the reed is just slightly out of alignment, which if it’s not too bad, you normally can nudge it back over. Occasionally you have to take it off and renail the nail.

Miller: So you’re just sort of pushing it a little bit.

Beer: Yep. I think that might have been fair enough. Yep, I got it.

[Smooth accordion noises]

Miller: Oh, and it sounds like what you’re really paying attention to is the quietest parts there, where the vibration starts to slow and that’s when the buzzing is the bigger issue.

Beer: And that’s normally where you can also tell where the valves are not working quite as well, if they’re curly and stuff like that, that one’s kind of gonna go gurgle.

Miller: Although I have to say it’s, if that’s 60 plus years old and if those pieces of little leather straps…

Beer: The reed valves.

Miller: The reed valves, I would have guessed that they would be more worn, after 60 plus years.

Beer: They don’t do much besides just kind of flop open and, and depending on where the air goes, and actually this one looks like it’s been played a lot, which is good.

Miller: How can you tell?

Beer: Because the reed valves are still sitting tight to the reeds. They’ve got a few that are curling a little bit.

Miller: But are they like cars or a lot of machines, where if you use it regularly, they’re actually going to be in better shape?

Beer: Yeah, a lot of times accordions that sat too long is, it’s a lot of work. For instance, like this side, it’s easy to tell, this is the bottom of the accordion. All of the reeds are pointing up along with, along with the valves and over time, if they’re just sitting, the gravity just pulls them over, like that one’s already starting to go.

Miller: It reminds me of a line that I just read, that accordions are maybe one of the only, or the only instrument, that you have to hug to play.

Beer: I know it’s kind of one of the things I like about them.

Miller: Is that just that a famous line about accordions?

Beer: Yeah, I don’t know who said it but I’ve heard it before.

Miller: I mean, what made me think of it was this idea that, when things are used or loved they’re, and, or people too, they’re more likely to be healthier.

Beer: Yeah. Totally true. And that’s, I mean part of it, yeah, it wants to breathe, and your hugging it makes it breathe.

Miller: Literally.

Beer: Yeah, if it’s not breathing, then all of the things that it uses to breathe get, the leathers get dried out and hard, the valves get, the reeds get full of dust and dirt. Yeah, it wants to breathe.

Miller: Did you go to Italy as well, in addition to going to Wisconsin as part of your training?

Beer: Yes, I did the Wisconsin week-long intro course. And then I think within a month or two after that, I found out about the courses in Italy and signed up for those right away and went for two and a half weeks, I think the first time, for some pretty in depth training and all accordion repair, which was nice because being in Europe, I got to see more of the button accordions. And then after that, I went back to the museum for another month and a half to study with Helmi, the person who runs the museum, and then back to Italy the next year for another week of training.

Miller: At what point in that sort of odyssey did it seem like your plan was going to work, that you were gonna be able to actually shift careers and make a living repairing accordions?

Beer: I think it was fortunate that all this was happening during the pandemic, to be honest. 2018, I think, was when I went to Wisconsin and then 2019, I think was the last time to Italy, if I remember right. And I was working a part time job at a chocolate company still, and ended up on unemployment because of COVID and could [then] focus on the business and started getting more and more people bringing accordions in and then it felt like it was actually gonna work.

Miller: What did the pandemic mean for accordion playing?

Beer: I think a lot of people were like, ‘Hey, I have this in my basement and I don’t know what to do with it.’ And I got a lot of those coming in, I think.

Miller: Like, people who weren’t making sourdough bread for the first time, decided to dig out their grandmother’s accordion?

Beer: Yeah, I think so. It seemed like maybe a quarter of them are, like, how much is this worth? Which is usually nothing.

Miller: Really?

Beer: Yeah, usually. They don’t really appreciate with age like violins, right?

Miller: They’re worth love and joy and community, but they’re not worth $500?

Beer: Some of them are, even this one, like, once I get done doing service on it, it’s worth and you could sell it, buy it for like, three fifty, four hundred.

Miller: But people were thinking, do I have a priceless heirloom?

Beer: Exactly. Especially since a lot of the older ones are covered with rhinestones. So it’s like, oh, it’s just so bedazzled. [Laughter]

Miller: So that was some percentage of the people who would come to you. But others, they had played it before, or they’d never even played it?

Beer: Never, mostly. And that there was like, ‘I want to, I’m not doing anything and I always kind of wanted to do it. And now I have time. Can I use this accordion? Can you make it work?’

Miller: And that was your start.

Beer: Yeah.

Miller: Well, what about now? I mean, we’re in the post-pandemic - seems like an absurd phrase - but certainly a different phase of endemic-ness of the virus and life is opening up. Do you have a practice now of, or, a going business concern?

Beer: I think things are still going up, which is really nice, so much it is by word of mouth and it’s just taking time for that word to get out, I think. And there aren’t really much for repairs in the area, you kind of have to go quite a ways to get with somebody.

Miller: You call yourself the Squeezebox Surgeon. I mean, it’s a great phrase. It also makes it seem like these are patients. When they come in, are any patients just too sick to save?

Beer: Oh, totally. Like the ones in the pandemic era, there were a good number of them that would show up that it’s like, yeah, I could fix it, but it’s gonna cost like, well over $1000 and it’s worth $200. So, yeah, it definitely happens, which is how we end up with ‘parts’ accordions.

Miller: Oh, just because they don’t want them, sometimes they would say you can just have it?

Beer: Yeah. So I’ve got a pile of accordions upstairs in the attic and in the basement.

Miller: And you know that there’s some piece of something that you might salvage from that one for a new one you’re working on?

Beer: That’s what I’m hoping for.

Miller: Or else just fill up your attic.

Beer: Yeah. Hopefully I haven’t turned into my mom’s pack rat.

Miller: When was the heyday of accordion popularity in this country?

Beer: Oh, probably the ‘40s and ‘50s. ‘30s and ‘40s.

Miller: And what would it have been like then?

Beer: People were playing accordion everywhere and there were entertainers who were playing accordion. Guido and Petro Daro are kind of like the first Italians to come over and make the accordion popular in the U.S., playing vaudeville and stuff. And Guido was making, like, 600 bucks a week in the ‘20s and he had his own railroad cars and stuff.

Miller: Like a rock star?

Beer: Totally.

Miller: I’m not gonna ask if that could happen again. But in addition to, ‘I have an accordion in my basement and it’s April of 2020 and I’m going crazy, so let me fix it up,’ do you think that there’s the possibility for more interest in accordions going forward?

Beer: I hope so and I think so. The accordion is pretty popular everywhere outside of the U.S. and always has been. And it’s definitely, I think, picking up steam here in different cultures and things. If you really do pay attention when you’re listening to commercials, pop music, any of it, it pops in, in so many different little spots and you don’t normally even notice. And there’s been the whole resurgence in world music and ethnic music. I think [it] is helping bring a lot of that back too.

Miller: Thanks very much.

Beer: Thank you.

Miller: David Beer calls himself the Squeezebox Surgeon. He repairs accordions in Southeast Portland. You can see some photos of our visit on our website, opb.org/thinkoutloud.

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