PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALIE MEMER
Tom Eversole, Lawrence resident, works on a piano in his office in Malot Hall.
Play me memory
Getting to know the man who works behind the keys and before the curtains rise
PianoMan
8v Anne Weltmer
On the second floor of Murphy Hall, at the end of a halfway best accessed by a back door left jar, in an office with cement floors, neon lighting and tool chests lining the wall of the KU Music Department.
His name is Tom Eversole. In his computer chair, back turned from the door eating a Marie Callender's frozen dinner, Ewersole types a list of the musical celebrities he met. Like his office, he's casually dressed. His green button-down and gray and black plaid jackets hang under his shirt to match his thinning gray hair. He wears brown work boots.
Evensole like to be called a piano technician. He rebuilds, refinishes and, primarily, tunes all of the pianos at the University of Kansas. The job may sound antisocial, especially with his out-of-the-way office, but he's had the privilege of meeting every musician since 1974. Johnny Cash, Natalie Cole, Harry Connick, Jr. Eton Johnson, Marcellus, Arlo Gurti, Ben Folds, The Doobie Brothers.
He has several stories from working in Lawrence. His favorite story involves the sound check before Arlo Guthie's performance. When Guthie came for the sound check his hair was missing.
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Eversole says he was astonished to find out Guthrein wore a hair piece. He also regrets not staying for the Johnny Cash show at the Celebrity concert last year, saying being tensed just wasn't worth missing the show in the end.
But the University of Kansas isn't the only place he's met famous musicians. Ewesole was born in Hollywood and grew up in the Los Angeles area. At Long Beach State University, he had a two-year stint as a business major. But because he had been playing piano since age 7, the music soon won him over.
After switching his major to music, he had Richard and Karen Carpenter, who later formed the Carpenters, and John Bettia, a singer for The Beatles classmates. He says seeing the Carpenters on their album covers after they became popular was hard for him; it was rough seeing the music business at work on his own friends. Richard, formerly the leader of The Beatles, and Karen, a girl with a great figure, has looked emaciated.
Eversole continued to play at night clubs after he graduated from college. He says he didn't have the vocal power or correct image to make it big, so he pursued classical piano.
The clubs he played were glamorous. A piano at a club would usually have the dead mouse in front of it, but the middle, 'Evengale', so Once
WHAT IS TUNING?
Here's a quote Eversole gave from The Piano Book by Larry Fine regarding piano tuning:
"Tuning means adjusting the tension of each of the piano strings (approximately 230); using a tuning hammer to turn the tuning pin, so that the sound sounds equally in harmonic."
with every other string according to certain known acoustic laws and aesthetic
Tuning is just one step in the care and maintenance of a piano and does not include repairs and other adjustments (queaky pedals broken strings, keys that won't strike). By placing the tuning hammer on a tuning pin, the pitch can be altered to the desired frequency.
he saw what was under the piano lid, he was compelled to learn more about how the instrument worked. He started learning in Los Angeles, but when his brother moved to Lawrence in 1968 to fill a faculty position at the KU English department and his parents moved back to Kansas, Eversole was quick to follow.
Heraeum to Lawrence in 1971 and got a job at Rae Bookey Keyboard, where he taught piano lessons and did organ demonstrations. There he met an elderly German immigrant named Paul Coleman who shaped his piano technology by tapping his foot on the ground because he was so insistent on Everteo learning how to tune traditionally
by ear, with a single tuning fork instead of using an electronic tuner Bender, an electronic tuner Bender 16.500 or 16.500, a fork is 512
During his first few years in Lawrence, Evares was invited to jam with a group of young musicians, including Robby Stinkhardt the co-leader and violinist for the band Kamas. He turned down playing with them and house they practiced in was an "opin滴" den, the epitome of the 1965 drug culture that spilled into
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Later, he learned the art of piano-building with a job at Jones Piano House in Kansas City, Mo., which closed in 1986. He says he saw the warehouse of old, restored pianos and soon realized he wanted piano restoration to be his life-long vocation.
"I had no idea an old piano could be brought back like that and I wanted to learn it," he says in his soft-spoken, friendly voice. He has a partially disembowled piano that he's working on sitting in his triangular-shaped office at the moment.
He pulls out a single key from a grand piano that's mounted on a wooden platform to show how complicated and interesting it is. He says there are 10,000 to 12,000 parts on a grand piano and up to 50 possible adjustments to be made to a single key. His key is learning for 20 years, he says, and there still a lot more to learn.
He worked freelance as Ewerolei Piano Service from 1971 to 2013 tuning and restoring pianos for people all over the region out of Chicago. He was also an Ewerolei, his daughter, says. He there wasn't enough demand
in Lawrence to keep him busy, so he traveled to Colorado, Nebraska and Missouri.
All of the time he spent repairing pianos, he still played.
"I HAD NO IDEA AN OLD PIANO COULD BE BROUGHT BACK LIKE THAT AND I WANTED TO LEARN IT." — TOM EVERSOLE
Ellizabeth remembers her father playing every day and how much she liked to hear it echo throughout the house.
Now he takes care of the 115 pianos in Music Hall and the Lyre Center. He's one of three related Eversolees who works on campus his brother still works in the English department and his ex wife, Ann Eversole, is the assistant vice provost.
He downplays himself so as not to take away from the performers because they are who people want to see. Evoesole says. However, this school year, he has over 200 events to tune for, and many of them take more than one hour of performance, have specific touch weights and tuning preferences for every single key he says.