[TOBY SUMMERFIELD PERFORMING]

TOBY SUMMERFIELD: My name is Toby Summerfield. I'm a guitar player and bass player in Chicago.

[TOBY SUMMERFIELD PERFORMING]

I’m a big, enormous dude. I worked for eight years as a piano mover. During that time, you would hear me say that I would get paid more to move my gear to a gig than I would to play the gig. You know, if somebody hired me to move a van full of musical equipment from one place to another, I would make a couple of hundred bucks whereas I would go and play and make nothing. Sometimes I would become enraged.

Being huge helps with moving pianos. The guy that I worked with was in his ‘60s and needed a hip replacement, not particularly burly, but he knew all of the easiest ways to do things. There’s a piece of equipment called a sled board. There’s two different kinds. There’s a flat sled and a buckeye board. The buckeye board kind of looks like a regular hand truck except huge, and it comes with a sort of this strapping attachment. It’s kind of like an appliance dolly like you would move a refrigerator on where it’s metal and there’s a short lip at the bottom and you have a winch attached to it that’s part of the framework of it.

I never used a buckeye board in part because the guy I worked for was uninsured and buckeye boards are a little bit more erratic in their behavior than a flat sled. The flat sled is just a piece of wood with padding on top and a padded heel and slots to put straps through. And, depending on the move, we put almost any piano on that, spinets, uprights, and grands.

Yeah, you need a big enough vehicle to move it around and you need a sled, you need a four-wheel dolly, you need some furniture pads, and you need somebody who’s done it a bunch before. The hardest part isn’t having the strength to push it up the flight of stairs, to lift up the thing you have to lift up. It’s knowing that if you do a particular thing the right way, the piano will not kill you. You won’t get crushed against a wall. If you think the piano is going to crush you against the wall, it’s very hard to summon the strength to push it up the flight of stairs. There’s nothing harder than like if I do this it will kill me.

I don’t -- You know, I’m trying to think if I have any horror stories. Having done it so much is sort of glorifying. You know, there were moves when we moved a piano like a grand up three or four flights of stairs like a four-story walkup or a three-story where it’s really like it’s above a storefront and all the ceilings are like 15-foot ceilings so it’s really like going up four floors.

I have a pretty neat scar. It’s hard to see now but there’s this from where a piano lid. I was at the bottom of it. I sort of had it on my shoulder and the guy above me was an amateur. We were moving a friend’s piano, the guy above me was an amateur and did a thing that let the piano go onto me. Now, I was holding on to the railings on either side, and knowing that I’m not going to let the piano crush me, I did not let it crush me, but like the piano was sitting basically on my arm in the air. I was on my arm in the -- I guess the corner, maybe the bottom corner. The bottom corner wasn’t on the step. It went on to me and then went onto the stairs. I wasn’t really worried because I knew it wasn’t going to kill me because I knew it better than to get worried.

Basically, you want to avoid picking it up at all costs. Deadlifting it is the worst idea. Moving it without equipment is also a bad idea, no matter how many people you have. I would move a 9-foot grand that weighs 3,500 pounds with one other dude, an old, crippled man who needed a hip replacement, who’s very sweet, very good at moving pianos, and again no insurance but he never needed it.

I think I mean as far as gear goes, I got to see some fantastically beautiful pianos and also some crazy houses. I think the coolest piano I ever saw that we moved was actually a piano of this woman who moved around to different venues to perform. She’s an early music professor in Michigan, and she had a fortepiano, I guess is the name of the instrument from before you had metal harps in the piano. So this was all wood and had knee levers instead of foot pedals. It makes it easier to transport.

She had had it appraised. The lid was painted by -- Yeah, it was built in like the early 18th century so like 1720 or something, and the piano -- the lid had been painted by some famous lid painter, and the lid alone had appraised like $250,000, and the case, that’s the -- If you think about a regular baby grand, the big, 2-inch piece of wood that wraps around the outside that the soundboard sits in and then the harp sits on that, the case alone in this piano, the pianoforte, fortepiano, had appraised for $250,000, also the soundboard, but those were all, if you found a destroyed instrument that had been taken apart and all you had was this one relic of it -- So the piano itself has been in its original condition for 300 years, had no appreciable value like nobody knew how much you could sell it for because one had never sold in hundreds of years. Who would move that? It was light. It was really easy. Those were easy.

She had it insured for a hundred million dollars, but since it was given to her by another early music person, the last time wanted so old was like 1850, and it sold in 1850 for hundreds of thousands of dollars. She had it insured and she had hired us, knowing that we would never ever destroy the piano. The best reputation does better than the best insurance.