By Bradford Wernle - February 1989
Qydeco accordion player Rockin' Sidney was having trouble keeping his accordions tuned, and the reeds on his instruments were always breaking - frustrations a musician who plays 250 nights a year can't afford.
Sidney who never uses his last name (Simien), says he saw an advertisement in a music magazine for Castiglione Accordion & Distribution Co. in the Detroit area. He came up from his home in Lake Charles, La., to check out the merchandise in 1985.
Sidney bought two accordions from Castiglione on that first trip and has since bought two more, spending nearly $15,000.
John Castiglione, 50, managing director of the company, persuaded Sydney that he had good-sounding merchandise by playing several instruments over the telephone.
"He was loaded down chockablock" with accordions, said Sidney, whose accordion-driven zydeco dance music falls somewhere between rock, blues and Cajun.
Castiglione had sold a lot of accordions before he solved Rockin' Sidney's equipment problems. He will continue to sell even more. The 55-year-old company moved earlier this year (1988) from its offices on East Seven Mile Road in Detroit to a new office complex on 11 Mile Road in Warren, where the peripatetic Castiglione is launching an extensive office complex.
Castiglion is one of those restless people who takes a keen interest in everything. He's a talkative, intense man, and there aren't too many subjects he would decline to discuss.
He is an authority on real estate in Macomb County, he knows the good Italian restaurants in San Francisco, and he has his finger firmly on the ever-changing pulse of the securities markets via a financial wire service in his office. Most of all, he knows about accordions, which until recently were blamed for helping Lawrence Welk and others foist bubbly, schlocky music on the world.
In the post-World War II era, the accordion was a popular instrument, particularly among families who had come to America from Europe. But the popularity of the Beatles, who eschewed the accordion, and Welk, who overused it, consigned the instrument to undignified obscurity.
Now the accordion is no longer the butt of so many jokes. Bruce Sprinsteen and his accordionist, Roy Bittan, brought the accodion back into favor during the 1970s. And it has remained there ever since, thanks to the music of performers such as Los Lobos, Clifton Chenier, Buckwheat Dural, Weird Al Yankovic, Tom Waits and Bruce Hornsby.
Castiglione is an authority on all the different permutations of squeeze boxes. "So many music stores have no knowledge of accordions and concertinas," he said. Concertinas and melodeons are smaller versions of accordions with fewer keys.
Castiglione, who is putting together a spiffy showroom at his new warehouse, obviously comes by his know-how naturally. In his office, he has a picture of himself as a mere tadpole, clutching an accordion much larger than he was. In the photograph, he is sitting next to his father, Vincent Castiglione, an Italian immigrant who came to Monroe around 1918 as a paper-mill worker and founded the accordion firm in 1933. The elder Castiglione started the business one day in a gas station, when he pulled his accordion out of the trunk of his car and demonstated it for some eager listeners. They offered him three times what he had paid for it, so he sold it and bought more. His son learned to play almost as soon as he could walk.
The younger Castiglione assumed control of the company in 1960 after his father suffered a minor heart attack. Vincent Castiglione died in 1972. John Castiglione now claims to sell more accordions than just about anybody. A walk through his warehouse becomes a tour through what Castiglione calls a "combobulation" of many different ethnic markets. Castiglione interrupts the walking tour frequently by grabbing different instruments and playing them.
Though Castiglione says he is only an average accordion player, he plays each of the instruments with enough dexterity to fool a listener who doesn't make a steady diet of polkas and rhumbas. Castiglione prides himself on the number of different markets in which he sells instruments. There are roughly 25 different types of accordions, each with its own fingerings and tuning. And each appeals to a different market. Players in the midwest polka market buy 200 polka-type button boxes each year from Castiglione; ethnic groups from the area now comprising Yugoslavia buy melodijas with Bohemian fingering, while zydeco musicans use accordions with piano-style keyboards.
Folk musicians are taking to the squeeze box in record numbers these days, too, and Castiglione has an ample supply of English concertinas and melodeon. The latest hot thing is the Hispanic ethnic market. But accordions are what sets his place apart. At Castiglione, they're coming out of the walls. "He had one in there like I'd never seen," said Rockin' Sidney. "It had seven rows of keys." And probably not a one of them out of tune.
