Straight Life (29 page)

I was afraid she was going to jump out the window. I would have gotten busted. I had marks; I had stuff there; I had an outfit; and she was screaming all this shit: "Junkie! Lady's boy!" Finally, I walked out the door. I said, "Do whatever you want." I walked down the stairs. I didn't know what to do. I went back upstairs, and she was gone. I went to the window and looked out. I looked for blood. I didn't see anything so I went downstairs again and asked the guy at the desk if he'd seen my old lady. He gave me a weird look. He said, "Yeah, she went out of here just a little while ago. Is there anything I can do?" I said, "No, it's just one of those hassles." He said, "Yeah, I know, I've been through it two or three times myself. Boy, they sure are a drag at times." I said, "They sure are a fuckin' drag."

I walked all over, looked all over. I went for hours looking for her and waiting and waiting. I went back to the place, and what seemed like days later she finally walks in.

She'd changed completely. She'd gone to the emergency hospital and told them she wanted to kill herself, and she wanted them to put her in the nut house. They sent her to a psychiatrist, and he listened to her story. Thank God, you know. Finally he said, "Do you love him?" She said yes. He said, "Well, you can do one of three things: You can leave him; you can stay with him the way things are now; or you can join him. Or you can kill yourself, but you'll just hurt him, and you won't solve anything that way." She said, "Well, I can't leave him, and I can't stand living with him the way it is, because I feel that he loves that more than me." He said, "Well that leaves one choice open. You can join him." So she'd decided that that was what she was going to do, and nothing could change her mind.

I begged her. I tried to reason with her. I told her it was the end of her life. Unfortunately, she knew the people I was scoring from, the houses I went to, and she said, "I'll go and score from them myself." I knew they'd give it to her because they love to turn a chick on; maybe they can get some head or something. They're real assholes, especially in Frisco, the people that deal. I was trapped. She said, "You can watch me now, but you have to go to work." There was nothing I could do except fix her. She was going to anyway, and I would rather do it myself because there was no telling what might happen to her. I was afraid she'd get an overjolt. I had to do it. I gave her a taste, and she loved it. I thought, "Here we go." She really loved it. And it was too bad. But it ended all the suicides, and our life became much more peaceful.

Diane's sister, Marie, was going with a guy named Bill who had been with the Four jokers, a singing group. Bill's mother had a lot of money, so she set him up running a hotel in Palm Springs. It was more like a motel, but fairly large; there was a bar. Bill had a comedian playing there, Yuki Sharon, a Jewish comedian who played piano and told jokes; Bill tended bar and sang and played a little snare drum with the brushes. Marie and Bill gave us a call and asked us to come up there, and Bill offered me a job working with Yuki. He said he would give us a place to stay and he would pay me a salary, so I said yeah.

Yuki Sharon looked like a caricature of a Jewish comedian. He was like a fat Sid Gould, and Sid Gould was the most Jewish-looking Jewish comedian I've ever seen. And he was the dirtiest Jewish comedian I've ever seen. He used to work for Blinky Palermo in Philadelphia in the underworld after-hours club. Yuki Sharon looked like him, with the big circles under the eyes, and Yuki was a great wit. He told good jokes and loved good jazz, the old jazz, and he played sort of like Fats Waller, simple but pleasant. It was easy work. We'd blow together and then he'd stop and tell a joke in the middle of the tune; I just followed him; and then, on a couple of songs, I was featured-he'd play behind me. It was enjoyable, and Bill gave me a good salary. Since we ate there and got our room for nothing, whatever I made was clear. We saved most of it because we had stopped using.

We stopped because it got impossible for me to support two habits. Now I was getting Percodan from a doctor, and we were getting Dexamyl Spansules, and we were drinking Cosanyl cough syrup-Cosanyl had dihydrocodeinone in it, which was very strong. So between the Percodan and the Dexamyl and the Cosanyl and pot and juicing very heavy I was doing good because I wasn't using heroin.

The first day we went to Palm Springs, the police were waiting for us when we came back to our car. They put us up against the car and searched it, the whole thing, because a '47 Pontiac sedan was an East L.A. or a Temple Street gang car. It wasn't like anything they had in Palm Springs. I explained the situation, the fact that I had a record. I had to tell them the truth because I didn't want to take a chance of anything backfiring on me. They told me to go to the police station and get a work permit and they said, "Once the cops get to know your car everything will be okay, but if you could get a better car you'd save yourself a lot of grief." In Palm Springs they try to keep up a certain air of respectability.

It was embarrassing, and we felt bad, so Bill said, "Let's go down and look around for a car. I'll give you an advance. We'll work something out." This was in '58, and we found a '57 Lincoln that was just beautiful. It was a convertible. It had a fantastic maroon paint job and a white top. Inside there were fur rugs, actual fur, and every single thing had a push button. It had been made for the shah of Iran. He'd ordered eight cars, all special, but two he hadn't taken, and this was one that had been used by somebody in Palm Springs and then traded in. It was in perfect shape. I told Bill, "God, I'd love to have that." I was afraid he wouldn't go for it but he said, "Well, you don't have anything else to spend your money on. Okay. If we can get it through, great." He signed for me. We got the credit, and the payments were ninety-nine dollars and fifty cents a month. At that time that was really high. I stayed on that job for quite a while, and Diane and I were getting along pretty good because there's nothing like success.

And then-I forget what happened-I think Bill's mother got angry at him. At any rate, she cut him off; he blew the hotel; and it ended the job. We had to go back to Los Angeles.

When we got back to L.A. we moved out to Studio City into a motel, and I looked in the newspaper for a job because I wanted to keep the car; I was really in love with it. I became an accordian salesman. I'd go to people's houses and give the kids musical aptitude tests. I'd play a note and then another note and ask them which one sounded higher. I'd ask them little rhythmical questions. I'd put this pretty little accordian on the kids, the keys all mother-of-pearl; they'd fall in love with it.

My territory was East Los Angeles, downtown L.A., Glendale, and Pasadena, a pretty large area. I'd get three leads a night, and if I sold the kid, if I could get the parents to give me ten dollars, then the kid got a certain number of lessons and he'd use one of those accordians for a while. I'd keep the ten dollars. After he finished this series of lessons the high-pressure salesman went out. He'd say he's taking the little accordian away, but if the kid wants to continue, he can march in the Rose Parade and all that. And the salesman would show him a great big accordian that cost a fortune. The kids would cry, and the parents, who were just scuffling and starving to death ... It was really sad. But in another way it was good because some of the kids really did have musical talent.

I did that for a while and did fairly well. I remember my first time out I sold all three leads and got thirty dollars. But it was hard work, and it became harder and harder to mantain the payments on the car, and a Lincoln, it costs a lot of money to get them repaired. You have to keep them up. Fortunately, instead of starting to use again we continued with the Cosanyl. I was getting fat, and people saw me and thought I was clean. Finally, this guy Steve White-who is kind of a legend around L.A., extremely talented and likable but totally crazy-I ran into him; he was playing with a rock group from North Carolina and he asked me if I wanted a gig-replacing him on tenor with that group. So I started working at this club in the valley called the Palomino.

Then Les Koenig asked me to do another album. I was really down with the tenor so I made Art Pepper plus Eleven playing alto, tenor, and clarinet. Marty Paich wrote all the arrangements. They were modern jazz classics, and I used large bands, well-known people, good musicians. When I did that, things started to open up for me. Diane and I moved from the motel to a nice little house in Studio City. I got a job at the Lighthouse working steady. Marty Paich started using me on a lot of Mel Torme's things and with other singers.

THE RETURN OF ART PEPPER by Jack Tynan

Hollywood-For Art Pepper the long, lean years are over.

Fast reestablishing himself as one of the most important altoists in modern jazz, busy with Howard Rumsey's Lighthouse All-Stars five nights a week and Sunday afternoons, the 35-year-old musician today has put his troubled times well behind him and is now seeking greater expressiveness as an artist.

So busy is Pepper, in fact, that it is hard to believe that only a year ago, he was selling accordions-along with lessons on the instrument-to make a living. He had no work to speak of, and had become a stranger in the recording studios where his name had been linked with the foremost experimenters a scant five years previous. To those musicians with whom he occasionally came in contact, he seemed a ghost of his old self. He appeared to have lost all interest in jazz and the playing of it.

"It's true I was pretty disinterested in music at that time," Pepper admits today. "But I began to put down the music rather than the circumstances."

In Art's case, the "circumstances" stretch a long way back. They cover his youth in Gardena, Calif.; his early days of sitting in with jazz greats when Los Angeles' Central Avenue and Main Street were swinging with all-night sessions; his first big break with the Benny Carter band when, as a 17-year-old, he sat alongside the late trumpeter Freddie Webster and trombonist J. J. Johnson; the great days with the Stan Kenton orchestra, and the oblivion that followed.

All these "circumstances" added up for the sax player to a total sum of disillusionment with music and a jazz world that did not seem exactly ready to welcome back Art Pepper with open arms. There was a brief period of recording in 1955-56, and an alliance with tenorist Jack Montrose that came to little but scattered night club engagements. The albums that emerged in that period were uniformly good, mostly quartet discs that showcased Pepper's flexible and dynamic style. The last of the quartet sessions, recorded for the Aladdin label, was never released on LP, though it is available on Omegatape. It is of special interest due to the presence on the date of the late pianist Carl Perkins. It was Perkins' final recording.

Withal, the deadly "circumstances" found their mark. Pepper became more depressed at the lack of recording calls, and at the repeated attempts to launch his own group in a town of clubowners ready to buy music for clowns. And so he withdrew from music, retreating into a personal shell that was made a little less lonely by his wife, Diane.

Today Pepper can say, without undue display of emotion, "Diane's understanding saved me; I owe so much to her." And it is true that in Pepper's darkest hours, when making a living in music seemed nothing more than a bad joke, Diane stiffened his will to endure and, finally, to return to jazz more eloquent than ever. down beat, April 14, 1960. Copyright 1960 by down beat. Reprinted by special permission.

THINGS were getting good. I bought a dog for Christmas for Diane. Actually, I bought it for myself. It cost three hundred dollars, a little champagne poodle, and we named her Bijou. I got more and more work. I got a call from Andre Previn at MGM to do the soundtrack on The Subterraneans, and I got to play a lot of solos. Then I got a call from Mickey Whalen, the music director at MGM, and I did Bells Are Ringing. I was drinking the Cosanyl, which is very fattening, and I was steadily putting on weight. I went from a hundred and fifty up to a hundred and ninety-five. People would see me and say, "Boy, you really look great!" And, "It's great to see you clean!" Between the two of us Diane and I were drinking three pints of this stuff a day and I was juicing heavy, but all our bills were paid; there was money in the bank; and 1 still had the Lincoln.

I had gone through a crisis and survived. Now I had a tenor, an alto, a clarinet, and a bunch of suits. I had just about everything I wanted, but I wasn't happy with Diane, you know, because I never had loved her. I married her because-I don't even know why now-I felt I owed it to her and I thought maybe, maybe I could just learn to love her, but it never happened. Right at this time Les wanted to do another album so he got another Miles Davis rhythm section: Wynton Kelly on piano, Jimmy Cobb on drums, and Paul Chambers, the only holdover, on bass. I was really prepared for this album, Gettin' Together, and it was excellent. I played great, and I wrote some of the arrangements. I wrote a tune that I recorded for Diane. Well, I wrote a tune and named it "Diane." It was a dream of somebody I would have liked to have had, and I called it "Diane" because I figured it would make her happy, and it did. The tune was way too beautiful for her, but what was a name?

I had the world by the tail. There was no end to what could have happened for me at that time. One night I had a record date-I forget who it was with, a singer-and after the session I was riding home on the freeway from Hollywood to Studio City, which is a very short distance; I was riding in my Lincoln, and I had the radio on, and I remember Ray Charles was singing "The Outskirts of Town," and all of a sudden I got very sad, I just got very sad, and I thought, "This isn't it. Something is wrong." I took my turnoff on Whitsett and turned left under the freeway and, without even thinking, I just made another left turn back onto the freeway; now I was headed toward Hollywood to the Hollywood freeway, which goes to the Santa Ana freeway, which goes to East Los Angeles, which is where all my old connections were, all my friends from my heroin days.