Sunday Is For Jamming
The music ‘just needed a place to come out’
 Kate Maier
Tom Bono and Sam DePoto found common ground with “Sunshine of Your Love” at a Sunday afternoon jam session at Crossroads Music in East Hampton.
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(10/02/2008) For a moment the sound of the piano faded out of the jam at Crossroads Music: The pianist, Bob Schepps, owns Hampton Bagel just up North Main Street and had to pause to sign a delivery receipt for an employee who appeared with trepidation in the doorway.
As one of the regulars at the Sunday afternoon acoustic jams at Crossroads, Mr. Schepps is part of a rotating cast of characters who are given free rein as long as they accept a few basic rules of thumb: “No ‘Stairway,’ ” — that is, no “Stairway to Heaven,” please — “no politics,” and “leave your ego at the door.”
During the high season, lines of eager musicians have spilled into the street, said Michael Clark, who runs the instrument, lesson, and repair shop with his wife, Christine.
“It’s all about the local music,” Mr. Clark said. “There’s a tremendous undercurrent of music in this community, it just needed a place to come out. It’s a community thing, it’s about having fun. . . . It’s almost like in the olden days, when they would sit around a potbellied stove and play checkers.”
On Sunday, the last of September, the crowd was lighter. Debbie Cosgrove, a barefoot, breezy singer, thumbed through the sheet music looking for lyrics before settling back down on a stool and picking up her tambourine. “There’s not much going on out here” in the winter, she said. “There’s an open mike night on Wednesdays at Fiddler’s Cove,” but otherwise, she said, she relies onto Crossroads for her fix.
Musicians from UpIsland occasionally join the jam.
“A guy I used to play in a band with walked in and saw me sitting here, and he was from West Babylon. We’ve all kind of crept back in,” she said, after leading the group through a chorus of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
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 Kate Maier
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I got divorced and went back to singing. I used to sing in a band, years ago. It’s just so much fun. Every Sunday is different. Sometimes there’s nobody there, and sometimes people like this come out of the woodwork.”
“Each of the people that comes down here frequently and plays has a particular band” they like to cover, said Mr. Clark as he watched from behind the counter. “Bagel Bob,” for instance, sticks with Billy Joel and Elton John, while another regular is a “real Dylan guy.”
“Depending on who’s here, you know what songs are going to be played.”
Tom Bono, a guitarist and a mechanic for the East Hampton Town Police Department, said his biggest influences are Southern rockers like the Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd, as well as Arkansas’s own Johnny Cash. “This is the best thing, I think, that has happened to East Hampton in a long time,” he said between songs, as Mr. Schepps coached two younger musicians on chord changes.
The two kids had hung around the periphery before edging toward the circle. “That’s the best part of the whole thing. No one’s better than anyone,” Mr. Bono said (referring to attitude rather than skill set).
“What else do you know that’s old, besides the guy sitting next to you?” asked Mr. Schepps, after they wrapped up Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” with a bass line contributed by Sam DePoto, a long-haired 13-year-old sporting a thin mustache, Nirvana T-shirt, and converse sneakers.
Sam offered that he knew “most of ‘Dazed and Confused,’ ” and Mr. Schepps asked to see what key he plays it in before the group attempted the Led Zeppelin classic.
“I’ve been wanting to come here for a while now, but I live on Shelter Island. I’m visiting my friend Jake,” Sam said of his fellow player, Jake Ruehl, a drummer who goes to the Hayground School in Bridgehampton. The two were dropped off by one of the boys’ fathers, who poked his head in a few times during the set to see how the boys were doing.
“I’m the unofficial photographer and the official groupie,” said Megan Ganga, who carried a Nikon D70 camera and a lunchboxful of assorted maracas. “I have a couple thousand pictures of these jams at home.”
“I’m a frustrated musician and I can’t play anything. I’ve taken fife, piano, guitar, and bagpipes . . . I can’t play any of them,” said Ms. Ganga, who has been showing up nearly every Sunday since the jams began two years ago (and who admitted she occasionally sings along).
“People get together and they form bands,” said Mr. Clark. “There’s people who might never have met if it weren’t for the jams here, so it’s kind of nice.”
“Especially during the summer,” he added, “someone always walks in for just one song.” A few months ago, a man of about 80 was buying something while the group played “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.”
“He just jumped in and started singing,” said Mr. Clark. “He just had his moment, then he left.”
Others will come in and “scope it out,” then show up the following week with a guitar.
But for the core cast the jams are typically an incubator for the Crossroads Coffeehouse performances, where “they have an opportunity to play on stage, in front of an audience,” Mr. Clark said. (The performances are scheduled to start up again at the Springs Presbyterian Church in November. Any money raised goes to the Springs Food Pantry or the Kris Dalene Music Scholarship Fund.)
The Sunday regulars come from all walks of life. Dan Maxwell is captain of a private yacht docked in Three Mile Harbor. For a while Sunday afternoon he worked the kick-drum and played the bass while singing along, a one-man-band within the impromptu band. Habitués of the Havana Beach Club in Montauk might have recognized him: He had a regular gig every Wednesday night over the summer.
“Normally I have to work on Sunday,” Mr. Maxwell said, but when he doesn’t, he winds up at Crossroads. “I never really had any real formal training. I just pick things up here and there.”
Like Mr. Maxwell, Mike Rusinsky, an electrician who lives in Montauk, has been a musician for the better part of three decades. “I just decided in the past year to improve my skills,” said Mr. Rusinsky of his motivation to show up for the jam. “If you practice, you get better,” he said, feigning shock.
“I call it a free lesson every time we come down here.”