I started accordion lessons in about 1977. I was 12 years old and really into rock & roll. My love for this genre was not considered when I chose to pick up the accordion. A friend of mine started taking lessons and played the instrument for me and I thought it was cool. So I signed up with his teacher.

Mr. Matlejan would visit my house once a week for half-hour lessons. I learned old Croatian folk songs. I also learned to read sheet music. I would rehearse between lessons and worked my way up to a bigger accordion.

I had started on a smaller beginner’s accordion, with only two rows of left-hand bass keys. As my abilities progressed, my parents then bought me a used, bigger accordion. It was white, mother of pearl plastic with black keys

Looking back, I was living two musical lives. One was on my accordion, which fit in well with my family of Croatian-speaking aunts, uncles, and other relatives in San Pedro, California. My other life was as a pre-teen listening to 93KHJ, the big hit AM radio station. The mid ’70s were the classic era of pop music. These are the songs that are still played on most radio formats across the USA.

I obtained one of those rectangular mono cassette recorder/players that were ubiquitous at the time in classrooms and libraries. I would put the player, with its built-in microphone, next to the radio and make my own mixed tapes. Then I would listen to my tape, and be perplexed as to why the song “Ballroom Blitz” by Sweet would always sound distorted. Now I get it — every time that song came on the radio, like a reflex, I would crank up the volume, which affected the already-crappy recording quality.

I don’t recall ever recording my accordion practice sessions, though. This is telling. As I reached my teens, I had discovered FM radio and groups like KISS and Led Zeppelin. The first Van Halen record was on every turntable in the Los Angeles area when it was released. My God, the pyrotechnic guitar playing!

It had dawned on me that the accordion was not a cool instrument.

Bruce Triggs is the author of Accordion Revolution: A People’s History of the Accordion in North America from the Industrial Revolution to Rock and Roll. The blurb for the book says, “Millions of people played accordions until a disastrous combination of economics, demographics, and electronic instruments nearly erased them from mainstream culture.”

So what happened to my beloved childhood instrument? Accordions ruled the USA for the first half of the 20th century. Then came the 1960s. When the Beatles changed everything, they not only squashed the popularity of the accordion; the instrument fell squarely on the fogey side of the cultural schism. Baby Boomers listened to acoustic and electric guitars. Old “square” people stuck to their fraternal groups, singing old standards to accordions. Youth joined countercultural scenes, like communes, where they sang Bob Dylan-type protest songs on guitars. When Dylan went electric, so did the kids with guitars.

While an accordion can blast a beer hall, it struggles on stage next to an electric guitar. Accordions do not mic well and tend to feed back next to the loud stage monitors needed for crashing drums, rumbling bass, and guitar stacks. This all was old news by the time I reached my own realization at the age of 15 that the accordion did not rock. It wasn’t long until I picked up the guitar myself, and became a rock bassist.

Yet at any time in my life, I could still pick up an accordion and play some basic songs. This has to do with childhood development. There is a window of learning which closes at puberty. There are studies of terrible cases where children were severely neglected and, as a result, lack things like basic language skills. On the other hand, skills that you learn before that window closes tend to stay with you for life. Studies show how teaching music to children and young people is great for development. Skills like concentration and the notion of delayed gratification are instilled through learning music.

My parents paid for my accordion lessons. As a result, I will always know how to play the accordion and read sheet music, the same way that I became bilingual through submersion in Croatian during my childhood.

So by all means, teach your kids accordion, if that is something they want to do! I caution youngsters contemplating the guitar that guitar players are a dime-a-dozen, and instead recommend some kind of horn or other non-rock instrument. That said, so many people have told me how they have picked up the guitar, and learned bass because of Nirvana. I brag that I have taught a million people how to play the bass. Nirvana songs are good for beginners to get into playing, especially the bass parts. But I do not recall anyone ever thanking me for inspiring their accordion-playing.

I did manage to play accordion on one Nirvana song. It was the cover of the Vaselines track, “Jesus Don’t Want Me For a Sunbeam.” This was for the MTV Unplugged performance and it brought some color to the event. I also played it on our unplugged set during our In Utero tour. I learned to hear the accordion just enough to get by and avoid the squealing feedback from the stage monitors.

Accordions are like living beings, as they eventually die inside. There is a lot of leather and wax which makes up the workings of an accordion and this material can dry over time. This makes the instrument wheeze — sound sick. Always play a used accordion before you buy one.

Kurt Cobain bought me an old 1950s accordion for a Christmas present. It’s red, and it still sounds and plays great. Since Nirvana, I have picked up the accordion now and then. But mostly, the instrument has languished in my closet.

In 2010 I started college, attending online classes to work towards a degree in social sciences. Around the same time, I started to play some music with Isaac Brock and Modest Mouse. Isaac has an incredible collection of instruments. There are some recordings of the material we made, with me on bass, but I also had the idea that I could make a contribution to this effort with accordion. I started to practice regularly, but when I got into school, my collaboration with Isaac fell off.

My college studies had me starting from basic high school math. I studied a lot of math — which tied my brain into knots. I found the accordion to be a soothing respite from algebra.

I started reading music again, from a collection of old songbooks I collected over the years from junk stores and yard sales, and I played along to Beatles songs to ease my brain. As it turns out, the band that killed the accordion actually sounds quite nice on the instrument.

There are so many rock songs and melodies which translate well to the squeeze box. If the accordion test is reduced down to the Beatles vs. Stones, the former wins most of the time. That’s because while Rolling Stones were more a guitar band, the Beatles, on the other hand, were overtly symphonic. Keith Richards drove the Stones with riffs conjured from alternative tunings. The Beatles were more formal with major and minor sixth and seventh chords. This is a playground for the left hand — small buttons — on the accordion.

The left-hand array of buttons of the accordion mystifies most people. It’s actually simple if you think of music in fifths. Why does accordion pump the polka so well? It’s the fifths! The Beatles had plenty of oom-pa tunes. Think “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” or the chorus from “The Continuing Adventures of Bungalow Bill.”

I will leave music theory to people like YouTube’s Rick Beato, who dissects the music of groups like Nirvana and the Beatles in scholarly terms. As far as my education goes, I graduated from Washington State University and I planned to go to graduate school and maybe get a law degree. However, only a couple of months after graduation, I started two new bands. My years of accordion practice to pacify my brain after doing basic math paid off, and I was now a good-enough accordionist to start writing music with a band.

I knew the cool sixths and sevenths, which helped develop the sound of the band Giants in the Trees. Another project I pursued was with author and lepidopterist Dr. Robert Michael Pyle, and we released a self-titled album called Butterfly Launches from Spar Pole. This is an art-music record and I play accordion on one number. This composition is inspired by The Doors — thanks to the late Ray Manzarek’s dominant keyboards for that legendary group.

Giants in the Trees transitioned into 3rd Secret, which features members of Soundgarden. Somehow, the universe conjured up a scenario where guitarist Kim Thayil is somehow on the same record as a Croatian accordionist.

This year, there was a Nirvana reunion of sorts for the FireAid benefit at the LA Forum. This event was part of the Grammy festivities in Los Angeles. Most of the old gang got back together for some Nirvana stompers, featuring vocals from Joan Jett, St. Vincent, and Kim Gordon. We played the song “All Apologies” with Violet Grohl singing, Kim on bass, and myself on… accordion!

During the live performance, my bass rumbled the stage and the arena. It was time for “All Apologies” so I picked the accordion up. (When was the last time an accordion was played on a Grammy stage?)

Kim got going on the bass. I could kind of hear the accordion during the song, as per my usual strategy. I was busy performing away, when I felt a bump on the bottom of the instrument. This was alarming. I looked down, and I saw that a roadie was plugging my cable all the way in! There had been no accordion in the mix because the cable was not fully inserted. I was hearing the accordion in my own ears, but no one else in the arena could hear it. At least I was in the mix during the last half of the song.

I was happy about the reunion. Nevertheless, I walked off stage a little disappointed. I even thought that I would never play accordion in a situation like this again! But after a minute or so, I calmed down and came to realize I will always play the accordion whenever I can, because the instrument is basically hardwired to my nervous system by a unique combination of childhood conditioning, adult math avoidance, and the past decade of my life as a musician. Plus, I think it’s cool.