Straight Life (46 page)

17

The Check Protector

1964 - 1965

WHEN I GOT OUT of San Quentin Shelly Manne helped me. They sent me to Tehachapi, and he wrote to me there and said if there was anything he could do he'd do it; he'd like to have me play in his club. Once you make parole you have to have a job to go to in order to get out. They gave me permission to write to Shelly and I told him I was coming up for another parole hearing, and he wrote a letter saying he would hire me.

I got out and finally got together the money to get back into the musicians' union. I've rejoined that union so many times. I would have been a life member long ago if I hadn't gone to prison. I worked for Shelly, and then I got an offer to go to the Jazz Workshop in San Francisco.

I was on the Nalline program. When you come out of prison you go three times a week to get a Nalline test. It works like this. You go in; once you're in the door's locked and you can't get out; you sign in and sit there in subdued light for about twenty minutes and then they call your name. There's a doctor there, and he's got this green light, and you look in the light, and he looks at the pupils of your eyes in profile and measures them. Then they give you a shot of Nalline. They skin it in your arm, and you go out and sit down for another twenty minutes before they call you back, and the doctor does the same routine again with the green light. If your pupil hasn't gotten smaller than it was the first time, you get an "equivocal," which is enough to hold you for. If your pupil gets larger, you're dirty, you've been using heroin; they immediately put you in a cage and then they take you down to the county jail. You go three times a week, and when you go you meet all the people you've been in prison with. Everybody that's there is junkies. When you get the shot of Nalline, if you're clean, you get loaded: you get a little buzz as if you've shot some stuff, and when you walk outside the little buzz goes, and then you get a headache, and you get depressed, and you start thinking of that little taste that you just had, and you want to get loaded.

You start using again, and through the grapevine you find out that if you take steam baths just before you go, and drink wine, and take bennies, you can pass the Nalline test. So that's what I used to do then, when I was chippying, and later when I was using. I had a friend, Hersh Hamel, who played bass, and he had a membership card for the Beverly Hills Health Club. He'd take me as his guest, and I'd go into the steam bath and stay there until I was almost dead, my skin hanging off my body, the sweat pouring out of me. Then I'd go get a couple of fifths of port wine or muscatel and drink it down and take five or six Dexamyl Spansules, or if I had some crystal (speed) I'd shoot it, or if I had some bottles-bombidos they call them in New York, here they call it methadrine-I would shoot that. I'd pass the test, but it destroys your body.*

At any rate, I went to San Francisco and took my tests up there at the San Francisco police department, and I played at the jazz Workshop, one of the greatest clubs going. It was almost an all-black club, run by black people, and I went in there with an all-white band. They had all-black bands all the time. But people were making these'little remarks about whites and honkies. People would come in and say, "What do we got here? Where's the brothers and sisters at?" And they'd tell the guy that was running the place, "Say, blood, what is this up theah? What is these guys tryin' to do? That's ouahhh music. Black music." And we had to put up with all that shit. And they say white people can't play jazz, but I disproved that, you know, because I played jazz, and all my white people played jazz. I had -Bill Goodwin on drums, a great young drummer; I had Frank Strazzeri, an Italian, on piano; and I had a Jew, Hersh Himmelstein-he'd changed his name to Hamel-on bass. (I'd call out his introduction, "Hoishie Himmelshtiiiiine!" I used to wig out announcing him.)

(Hersh Hamel) Art was at Quentin or someplace, and I had bumped into Diane. She told me Art was going to be out in about a month and asked if I could help, come by, drive him around, get some clothes for him. They didn't have a car, and she knew that I really dug Art and I'd help.

Art got out, and I took him around to get some shoes, some clothes. I took him to his Nalline tests downtown, and if it looked like he wasn't going to pass the test, he was messing around a little, I'd take him over to the Beverly Hills Health Club, get him in the sweat bath, stay in there for a couple hours to try to sweat it out of him.

At that time, we decided to form a group. I was running around with a drummer, Bill Goodwin, who's a great drummer, and we got Frank Strazzeri, myself, and Art, and we went up to my brother's house, who I was living with in Laurel Canyon, and we rehearsed and got some music together. Art had written some tunes in Quentin which were very interesting, "D Section," "The Trip," "Groupin'," nice tunes, and I wrote a couple tunes, so we had a little library of original things. When Art first came out, he wasn't using much at all; we played a gig at Shelly's Manne Hole and Art had a tremendous lot of fire.

Art was very influenced by Coltrane at that time because he was in jail with some pretty radical players. Art heard those guys in Quentin, and at first he didn't like it so much, he said, but after hearing them practice day after day, he started to pick up on what they were doing and to like it more and more. And then, when he came out, he was pretty well exploding, I can tell you, musically. So much so that when we went into Shelly's in 1964, Shelly Manne and some of the other guys criticized him terribly, "Oh, no, that's not the old Art." You know, "Doesn't sound like Art Pepper." And Art is so sensitive. When people start criticizing, he immediately starts bending. So he started coming off what he was doing. He started using shit again because he was getting some criticism. Diane said she liked the "pretty" Art Pepper better. She didn't like the harshness he was playing with. And I think some of the harshness came from the fact that Art had spent a lot of time in jail. There was a lot of hostility, a lot of pent-up emotion, and when he played he was barkin', boy! It was raw emotion, and it was great. Incredible. Whether he might think so now or not. If we could have recorded at that time! Les recorded us on a few tunes, but he didn't like it.

We went up to San Francisco at that time. I got some jobs for us and we worked at Don Mupo's club in Oakland for two nights. We started Friday night; on Saturday night the last tune we played was "The Trip," and the people were standing on top of the tables. I kid you not. The place was packed solid. You couldn't get into the club or out, hardly. People were standing on the tables, cheering, while we were playing. I've never seen anything like it; in jazz this very rarely happens.

Art wasn't using much then. Drinking some. But a couple of months later we came back to Frisco, to the jazz Workshop, and he was using. Funny thing, on a night when he wasn't using, he'd come in and complain about Frank Strazzeri and be real uptight with all of us and be really nervous about all the tunes. One night we played our ass off, the rhythm section just burned, and he was uptight all night. The next night, he came in all stoned out of his mind, and I didn't think we sounded anywhere near as good, and he was just smiling, knocked out with everything. So it wasn't really the way the band sounded, it was the way Art felt. But at that time, the level we were playing on was very, very good.

(Shelly Manne) When Art came out of prison, a lot of music had been happening. I always loved the way Art played. His lyricism was the main thing I really loved, a very emotional way of playing. And very coherent, well-constructed solos. Well, sometimes a musician feels challenged, feels that he's going to be left behind, that what he's saying isn't the in thing at the moment. The problem is, too many people, critics, magazines, newspapers, they make music a competition like a sporting event. It's not a sporting event. You don't go to a museum and say, "Well, I give four votes for Rembrandt and five for Van Gogh." You can't do that. Each person, if they can really play and they are artists, which I consider them to be because jazz is definitely an art form, if they have that inner ability, that creative drive to say something very personal ... There are no "greatests," you know what I mean?

If I tried as a drummer to play like Tony Williams or Elvin Jones, I'd fall on my ass. It doesn't make me not love them any less as artists because I can't do it. And in my own experience, I found myself going through a period, when I owned a nightclub, of having these guys work in my club, and the next thing you know, I'd be trying to play like them because I'd be so strongly influenced, so delighted, by what they're doing. And I saw how the crowds reacted to it. I thought, "Oh, they consider me old hat." But I'm older and a little wiser: the festival I was just on, there were a lot of drummers there and I didn't go up there fearing that they're watching me or that I'm not going to play my best. I just go, play, and have fun because music is fun.

Everybody should try to improve; their playing should constantly change by absorbing playing from other great players. You should never stop growing. But the one thing you have when you're playing the way you feel, you have an individual way of playing. And I felt when I first heard Art, when he came out of prison and did his first club date, I didn't like what I heard. Not because he wasn't doing it well. But I didn't feel that it was an honest expression of the person I was listening to, after listening to him for all those years. It's okay to borrow from somebody like John Coltrane, but Art lost a lot of that lyrical quality that I love about him. When Art overblows his horn, the individual sound he has just disappears. I love Art on tenor, too. He has an individual sound, which is one of the things all the great players have, whether it be Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Art. He was destroying that, and I was sorry to see it, and now, more recently, I heard him reverting to himself. And that other stuff is absorbed into his playing and is expressed by his own identity, which makes it still an individual thing. But there was a period when I thought he was losing his way as far as Art Pepper is concerned. That happens to a lot of players, but they find that the best thing to do is just go play the way you feel because nobody can do it the way you feel, and if it's good, it's good. And not to be influenced by what's happening at the moment. Everybody has great favorites of the moment.

WHEN I went into San Quentin I didn't know what was going to happen with Diane. She'd gotten out of Norwalk after her suicide attempt, and I told her if she wanted to go ahead and get a divorce she could do that. There was no telling how long I'd have to stay in San Quentin. I'd rather have her get a divorce. But she said, "Oh, no, no! I love you! I want to be able to take care of you! I want to do everything I can for you! Please, please don't deny me the chance!" So I said alright-against my better judgment.

Diane came to visit me after I'd been in San Quentin for several months. She got a ride up with someone. She'd been straightening up, and she looked like she was fairly clean, and I thought, "Well, maybe she'll be cool." She went back and wrote all the time, nice letters, and finally she got another ride up and came to visit me again. She told me she couldn't stand to go back to L.A. She'd decided she was going to get her stuff and come and stay in San Francisco and wait for me to get out. I didn't feel that she was together enough, and I didn't want her uprooting herself. In Los Angeles she had her mother, who was a lesbian, but nevertheless she was her mother and would help her. She had her sister and her father, who was a good man, and her father's wife. But I couldn't talk her out of it. She went back to L.A. to my dad and, I didn't know about this, but she told my dad I had said it would be okay for him to give her all my things. She wanted to move to Frisco and she wanted to have everything of mine there so when I came out I would have a place and all my stuff. She got all the things I'd sent my dadshoes, a lot of nice clothes, and scrapbooks and pictures and stuff. I had all my school things, report cards, pictures of my army career, mementos of my time with Kenton, clippings, awards I'd won, and a bunch of music. My dad didn't want to do it, but Diane conned him out of my stuff.

She moved to San Francisco, rented a little place, and she got a job in some nightclub, some bar. She put my clothes in the closet and the music and scrapbooks all around the little apartment so it would look like I was living there. And she told me she was imagining that I was just out playing someplace and I'd be back. She lived in a little dreamworld, and I thought, "Oh, well, I guess it's alright if she can make it." She seemed to be doing fine.

It was approaching Christmas. That's the only time you're allowed to receive anything in San Quentin. They give you a list of things you're allowed to have. You're not allowed cigarettes but you can have candy and nuts and cigars. There were a bunch of different things listed, and they had to be packaged and sent from the factory or from the store so no one could inject dope into them. You only have one sheet, one list, and you have to pick one person to send it to; if that person doesn't come through with your present you're out of luck.