Lady Of Spain, I Abhor You . . .

By Jesse Birnbaum

Scientists have known for a while that it is the shifting of tectonic plates that produces earthquakes. What scientists should be grateful to learn is that the reason the plates shift is that somebody is playing the piano accordion. Tectonic plates are very sensitive: they cannot abide the sound of accordion playing, and when they hear all that caterwauling, they shift uncomfortably, jolting the Richter scale to A above high C. It is no coincidence that earthquakes occur wherever huge numbers of accordion players congregate. Many of them are said to be aswarm in eastern China, where earthquakes are common, although the Red Cross has not yet been able to confirm this.

In light of these revelations, it seems odd that San Francisco, America's best-known earthquake center, has not taken the obvious course of compelling accordion players to register with the authorities. Instead, the board of supervisors has designated the accordion as the city's official instrument, thereby hastening the decline of San Francisco as we know it. Nothing more perverse has happened in that town since a woman collected $50,000 after claiming that a 1964 cable-car accident had transformed her into a nymphomaniac.

That the supervisors caved in indicates that the accordion lobby is as powerful as the National Rifle Association. That is no surprise, since both organizations favor unregulated possession of lethal instruments. At least it can be said for the N.R.A. that its members practice accuracy out of earshot, deep in the woods. They also wear earplugs to deaden the sound.

Accordionists are deadening too, though they do not wear earplugs or play deep in the woods. They go deep into dance halls, beer parlors, Communions and bar mitzvahs, inflicting Tico Tico and Hava Nagila with relentless merriment, not to say total disregard for euphony. It is their way of paying homage to their patron, St. Lawrence of Welk, but in fact they only irritate St. Andreas of Fault.

In San Francisco the chief irritant is a band of 15 or so perpetrators whose nom de guerre is Those Darn Accordions! and who charge kamikaze-style into restaurants, wreaking indigestion on helpless customers with deafening choruses of Lady of Spain. T.D.A.! even threatened to "play" in city hall but was prevented from doing so when engineers warned that the building might collapse from excessive vibration. Instead, it was the board of supervisors that collapsed. "One of the things I love about San Francisco," said T.D.A. ! accordionist J. Raoul Brody, "is that a bunch of dopes like us can get together and make something like this happen."

San Francisco is not the only epicenter of this distress. Deborah Norville, new co-anchor on the Today show and a closet accordion player, assaulted her audience with a blunt instrument rendition of the dreaded Lady of Spain. No earthquakes were reported, though the performance succeeded in further sinking the show's shaky Nielsens, while Norville's personal Richter rating slid glissando-style to C below low A, somewhere to the left of the keyboard.

How the accordion ever managed to achieve respectability is still a matter that confounds world civilization. It was named in Vienna in 1829 by one Cyrillus Demian. Right away, it should have been called the discordion, but nobody anticipated the disaster that would befall. Little was heard of Demian after that, but it is easy to speculate that he was invited to leave Austria and settled in China in plenty of time for the earthquake season. The Red Cross has not yet been able to confirm this.

What can be confirmed is that despite the frantic opposition of music lovers, the accordion gained wide notoriety, prompting such otherwise sensible composers as Sergei Prokofiev and Virgil Thomson to write for the instrument. When their work fell on deafened ears, Serg and Virg realized they had made a terrible mistake and returned to more dignified pursuits.

By then it was too late. The accordion proliferated like the South American killer bee, joining the family of base instruments that includes the comb and tissue paper, the bagpipe and the exhaust pipe. Today an estimated 75,000 accordionists can be observed running amuck across the U.S., competing in squeeze-offs. In self-defense, they are banded together in associations presided over by the likes of people named Big Lou. It would not surprise anyone to learn that a certain Big George laces himself into the accordion harness and knocks out a couple of choruses of Boola Boola when he can't find a friend to pitch horseshoes with. Big Barb wears the earplugs. (So do the Secret Service people, though for security reasons those little things in their ears are called radio receivers.)

Meanwhile, the accordion lobby's triumph threatens to encourage further erosion of the musical landscape. They have already infiltrated a punk band dubbed Polkacide and the backup bands of Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel. Next the city fathers of Detroit; Skokie, Ill.; and St. Paul will succumb and proclaim the accordion their official designated hitter. These cities are unaware that it is the convergence of hundreds of accordion players pumping out The Beer Barrel Polka in unison that depletes the ozone layer. The Red Cross is looking into this.

With reporting by Lee Griggs/San Francisco