About ten days ago I got an email from my friend Rich Campbell, pianist/vocalist/all around good guy, asking me if I was available and interested in a recording session for a network TV show. And, by the way, would I also be interested in appearing on the show as a member of a bar mitzvah band? If so, could I send in a photo so that casting could see what I looked like?

Of course, my answers were yes, yes, and yes. Work is good. Work that pays union scale is better than good. And work that pays scale from two different unions, with the potential for reruns and additional payments, is excellent! When I did the Tonight Show with Toots and Bonnie Raitt, I got checks every quarter for at least two years, in varying amounts. None were life-changing, but I didn’t have to lift an amp for any of them.

Since they wanted a real bar mitzvah musician look, I immediately suggested the legendary Jeff Ganz on bass. Not only is he one of the greatest on his instrument, he’s been playing bar mitzvahs since he was sixteen years old, which was some time ago. I haven’t played that many bar mitzvahs myself, but I am definitely in the proper age group and look beat up enough to pass cursory inspection. Rich thought that was a great idea and Jeff was on board. The initial report from casting was that they were very happy with everyone’s pictures and we all would be appearing on the show.

What show, you ask? It’s a new NBC series called “Smash.” Rich’s girlfriend Jackie writes for the show, and he described it as the adult “Glee.” I’ve never seen “Glee” so I didn’t know exactly what that meant. But I do know that any pop culture artifact that can be described by a reference to something that’s already successful is already half way to being successful itself. So I had high hopes.

The star of “Glee” is Katharine McPhee. I know she was on American Idol and sang “Black Horse And A Cherry Tree” on the show because I happened to see her doing it while flipping channels on a rare evening at home, but that’s all I know about her. She sang well enough to keep me watching until she finished the tune, which is another good sign.

Ms. McPhee is quite photogenic as well as musical, so I had hopes that she might turn up at the recording session and provide a dose of showbiz glamour to the proceedings. Though since the tunes we were going to be recording for the scene were “Alley Cat,” “Hava Nagila,” and a bossa nova Rich had written on request so that the show didn’t have to pay a third licensing fee, this didn’t seem very likely. At least I would get all the glamour I wanted on the day of filming.

For those of you who don’t know, in most cases other than live performance broadcasts, the music for such scenes is recorded separately from the video. On the day of shooting, the musicians mime to the previously recorded music. (This sort of gig is called “sidelining,” I’m not sure why.)

This is done for a variety of reasons. It’s hard to record live music on a film set, for one thing. A film set is optimized for capturing visuals, not audio. Sometimes actors even rerecord their spoken parts in a studio after shooting. Recording the music beforehand makes the director’s job a lot easier, as he or she can then concentrate on the actors’ performances and the camera angles without worrying about whether the musicians got the music right at the same time. There are also a lot more mouths to feed during filming (all at union scale, hooray!) so prerecording the music saves money too.

The recording session was scheduled for Saturday at 10 a.m., with filming the following Wednesday. I was told that I would have to be on the set at 7 a.m., and there was no way they could guarantee that I’d be done in time for my 8 p.m. gig. So I had to find a sub. Luckily, Steve Dash, an old college friend, was available and agreed to cover for me.

A day or two before the session, Rich called and said that he had bad news. I would be playing on the soundtrack session, but the script was rewritten so that the guitar player on screen had spoken lines. So the show had engaged an actor to play the guitarist on screen. Shot down before I could even blow the gig! Horrors!

I actually had mixed feelings about this. Of course, I would lose money because I wouldn’t be filming, and it would be good money, because overtime was practically guaranteed. If they’d let me read a line, it would be amazing money. (You get more money if you say something on camera, kind of like the witness protection program.) I wouldn’t meet Katharine McPhee, and I wouldn’t learn how a TV shoot works. (I’ve done the Tonight Show, but that show is totally live and shot in real time, a very different experience than drama production.) Sometimes that kind of knowledge can be useful, and I’m always up for learning how some other kind of art than music is created.

However, I had a recording session scheduled the night before and there was a very real possibility that I wouldn’t get home until 3 a.m. Not the best preparation for filming! I’m nervous enough about how I look with eight hours of sleep and my matinee idol years were decades ago. Plus, I wouldn’t have to cancel my gig. Admittedly, the money for doing network TV is too good not to cancel, but in the long run, it’s bad business not to show up when you say you will. I also wasn’t looking forward to sitting around for twelve or more hours in a tuxedo. No wonder actors get bank! A four hour wedding plus the cocktail hour is bad enough.

I think Rich was relieved that I wasn’t more bent out of shape. He’s a straight-up guy and nobody likes telling you that work they had promised you isn’t there any more. I did ask who was playing me and he said, “I’m not sure. Some guy from the Lion King who also plays guitar.”

I groaned inwardly. Of course, “playing guitar” could mean the ability to play five chords, or the ability to shred “Giant Steps” at 300 bpm. Just because somebody’s business card says “actor” doesn’t exclude them from being good at other things. Rich himself is a fine musician and he  acts as well. I told Rich that I was going to play some chord inversions requiring a six fret stretch on the bossa nova so we could tell if he was a real guitar player or not. He laughed.

The recording session on Saturday went beautifully. Of course, with Lee Finklestein on drums, Jeff Ganz on bass, Matt Cowan on sax and “the black stick” (for “Hava Nagila”) plus Rich and me, I wasn’t expecting any problems. The studio, the engineers, and the coffee were excellent, which made things even easier.

They booked us for four hours and we were done in less than two and a half, including a long break. We recorded several versions of the tunes featuring different instruments so that the director would have a variety of visual options. I got a guitar solo on the bossa and kept it simple, despite my earlier threat to do the opposite. I didn’t want to make it any harder for the actor to mime to than necessary.

My only regret was that the band was so good, I wished we’d gotten to play longer. Maybe they will need more bar mitzvah music, or perhaps the band will become recurring characters! One can always dream.

After the session, I drove to New Jersey for my guitar lesson and got caught in the blizzard. By the time I made it back home (after many adventures on the back roads of Bergen County) I had almost forgotten how I’d spent the morning. On Sunday I drove to Connecticut to see my mother, and the power was out throughout most of the state. The drive home was pretty frightening, with downed trees and power lines everywhere. It was an exhausting weekend for non-musical reasons and my thoughts on Monday were of the future, not the past.

So imagine my surprise when I got a phone call at 10 a.m. from the young lady in charge of costuming for “Smash,” asking what my sizes were so that she could have my clothes ready for filming on Wednesday! I told her that to the best of my knowledge someone else was going to be getting an Emmy for his portrayal of a middle-aged musician, not me. She insisted that my name was on the list for costumes, so I gave her my sizes as best I could, just in case. This wasn’t easy as I tend to buy clothes only when they wear out.

I immediately fired off an email to Rich to see if something had changed and I was now going to be in the show. (According to Rich, things change in TV from hour to hour, so this was entirely possible.) He knew nothing about this, so he immediately emailed a variety of people and copied me on the message. No one seemed to know anything for sure. But I did find out from one of the responses the name of my sub: Paul Berman. Aha! I was going to check this guy’s guitar skills out on line to see if he was worthy to play me. It’s a common name but I have mad Google skillz and I was confident I could track him down.

Within minutes I’d found him. Paul Berman, “Lion King,” etc., etc. And what visual greeted me on his web page? Two pictures of Mr. Berman playing DRUMS!! The horror! I was replaced on a gig by a DRUMMER who “plays guitar.” In all fairness there are some drummers who are excellent guitarists. Charlie Benante of Anthrax comes to mind. But I had my doubts about Mr. Berman. At least he was obviously a skilled actor. I deserve nothing less!

Believe it or not, I didn’t get the final word that my services would not be required until late Tuesday afternoon. The rest of the story is a bit anticlimactic. I did my gig on Wednesday, the other guys acted. I spoke to Jeff the next day and he said that it had gone well and that the music sounded very good, with the guitar quite audible. Of course, that doesn’t mean that it will appear in the show. Or that the show will appear! TV changes hourly, so I’m told. However, Dreamworks (meaning Steven Spielberg) is involved with the show. This dramatically increases the likelihood that it will air.

For those of you who are interested, the bar mitvah band, with Paul Berman in the title role of “Guitarist,” will appear in Episode Six of “Smash,” on NBC. I don’t know the episode title, or even what day and time the show is expected to air. But those with mad Google skillz like mine can probably find out. By the way, I heard a track that Katharine McPhee recorded for the same episode, a cover of the Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” and it sounded just great. We’ll see how the show does, and whether they even get to Episode Six (which sounds like the name of a Seventies lounge band). I’ll post the info if I get it in time.