The Last Holiday (24 page)

Jackson Browne came into my mother’s apartment locked on leaving, on getting to where he was going. But my mother was as firm as she was friendly. And I had to listen to the tape before I
could approve it anyway. While I looked around for the cassette player, she was guiding him to the table.

“Come and sit down, you poor thing. It will only take a minute and you’ve got to have something to eat.”

Jackson reluctantly sat down and relaxed, maybe for the first time in hours.

I listened to the tape. It was an abridged version of “Detroit,” smoothly shortened to fit the producers’ request that it not exceed three and a half minutes. I was okay with
whatever, recognizing the recognition of my participation that would come with being included on the album and film. Hearing the song, I was reminded of how that whole evening had gone and how much
I had enjoyed seeing folks from the music community working together and trying to do something positive.

I saw Stevie Wonder with Barbara Walters on
20/20
one August night in 1980. Seeing Stevie on that show made me realize he was braver than I would ever be again without
the TV equivalent of a prenuptial agreement—I’d been double-crossed too many times. So there I was, watching Stevie go one-on-one with the queen bee of beating people up.

I didn’t doubt Stevie’s ability to represent himself, but TV ratings are not based on making subjects look good. They don’t even have to make you look like you. They have to
make an audience look. But it’s hard to make Stevie look bad. He is as clever with his vocabulary as he is versatile with his keyboards. He was adept at saying what he thought about your line
of questioning if it was out of order, always maintaining that same smile of his. I nodded at the screen as he played a few chords of “Happy Birthday” on the piano, with a smile.

The news was that Stevie was going on tour in October with Bob Marley and would be promoting his new LP,
Hotter than July
. He was also planning a rally in Washington, D.C., in January
1981, to bring attention to the question of a national holiday honoring Dr. King. Happy Birthday.

I watched Barbara Walters because Stevie couldn’t. With the half-glasses sitting on her nose like an acrobat on a seesaw, reading glasses that she used to read Stevie while she scanned her
notebook.

I knew the announcement of the tour meant that Stevie would be coming to D.C. and I knew when they got there I would have a ticket.

It didn’t work out that way. What I mean is, I got to the Washington concert but I didn’t have to pay. And that was also something that I could not have predicted. I didn’t
find out I’d get in through the stage door until November.

A few days after I saw Stevie’s interview with Barbara Walters and told myself that I wanted to see his show, I got a call from an old New York friend named Clive Wasson. I didn’t
know what kind of work Clive was doing, but I could almost hear the L.A. in his voice.

It was a pleasant conversation. We had some people that we both knew and spent a few minutes going over their current situations before Clive got down to business. He was working for the folks
who were promoting Stevie’s tour with Bob Marley. The problem was that Bob was on tour with the Commodores and was playing in the next few weeks in the same cities Stevie would do in early
November. And just where would the Midnight Band be in early November?

I had spent the better part of five years getting people familiar with the Midnight Band onstage and on three albums. But now that the name had indeed established some recognition even among
promoters, there was no Midnight Band. We had reformed and added women to our songs on
Secrets
in 1978, and then took those women vocalists on the road. After less than a year we’d cut
back to a quintet we’d called A Mere Façade, but the West Coast representative of our record label came to me in Denver one night and said, “Who are these Arab dudes you’re
playing with—who’s Emir Fasad?” After I got up off the floor from laughing, I needed another name change because the potential for phonic distortion was obviously more extensive
than I could overcome. People continued to refer to whoever I brought with me as the Midnight Band, but Brian’s departure, in March 1980, had erased the last trace of “Midnight”
from my music. At that point I had reconnected with Carl Cornwell, the play-anything wizard I had known since my days at college, and we reconfigured the rhythm section and added horns. The band we
organized had a totally new sound, and I called it the Amnesia Express. From mid-April through early July, I had been on tour with the new group and then recorded an album scheduled for release in
late November.

All I had in my calendar for November was a gig in Atlanta and a solo show at Kent State University. I figured I’d play a few gigs before Christmas so the guys could all play Santa Claus,
but what Clive was proposing wouldn’t interfere with any of that.

“I’d be glad to be employed for a couple of weeks,” I told Clive.

I gave Clive the number for my agent in New York to discuss the dates Stevie had on tap for his first two weeks. As far as I was concerned, I was looking at found money. It was looking like our
folks would have a Happy Thanksgiving and we could work on a Merry Christmas later.

Things were looking up.

Show business is just like any other business in certain respects. Of course, people in show business have a visibility that paints a “larger than life” aura around
them. Their work in music, movies, or some facet of entertainment makes them a part of people’s lives. They are so well known in the corners of everywhere that it feels as though
they’ve lived more than one lifetime. The fact that certain aspects of the arts endure beyond the span of normal expectations makes them a part of generations born after their contributions
were completed.

The exploits and exploitation of the arts make individuals with no more talent than a turnip famous for ages. The stories their lives inspire give them reputations that inspire continued
repetition. There are heroes and zeroes. There are people of sincere and genuine talent and others who couldn’t do wrong right. Just like, I imagine, every other walk of life.

You meet some people that you wish like hell you never had, and others who make such an impression on you that you feel convinced you made the right career choice. You meet some people you are
proud to call your friends, and others who are so crooked that when they die you’re sure they’ll be screwed into the ground. The influence these people have on your life depends on when
you meet them. I will always believe that you need to meet good people, talented and generous people, in order to later withstand the bitter disappointments that destroy the careers of so many
talented people.

I started at the top when it came to wonderful, talented, and generous people. During my first week of publicity for
The Vulture
and my book of poetry I was a guest on a New York radio
program hosted by Mr. Ossie Davis and Miss Ruby Dee. And in all honesty, I don’t remember a word I said if I said anything, because they also had John Killens and John Williams on, the two
brothers who were both great Black novelists, and I think I just sat there in the studio with my mouth hanging open.

I doubted if Ossie and Ruby remembered me from that. Apparently, though, they had kept up with me; prior to our first gig on the
Hotter than July
tour, which kicked off in Houston the
last week of October 1980, they invited me to do a TV show they now had on Houston’s PBS channel.

The Ossie and Ruby show was action-packed and we could thank PBS for that. Before there was cable TV and umpteen hundred channels, PBS stations were primarily broadcast on VHF and their programs
were on one of the four or five lines in your daily TV guide in the paper. That way, even though their prime time programs were sometimes buried under an avalanche of promotion that the networks
gave their shows, there was more of a possibility to notice what they were offering. One of the shows I religiously tried to catch was
Ossie and Ruby!
because there would be certain sections
of the show featuring the cohosts doing a reading or comic skit that showed real versatility and talent.

The day before we taped the show, I checked into our hotel about midday and arrived at the studio in plenty of time for the round table production meeting where I found out what we were doing. I
knew the band would enjoy it. There were songs we played on most shows, like “Winter in America” and “Storm Music,” along with a couple of songs we had never performed on a
show: most notably “Jose Campos Torres” and Vernon James’ composition “Morning Thoughts.” I felt as though the staff had done a great job because they had packed
twenty-eight minutes of our songs and poems to put into a thirty minute show. I didn’t raise one objection or have anything to add. I sat through the meeting nodding at them like a
bobble-head doll.

The biggest rush was that I felt as if I was sitting with royalty. It was like the feeling I had when I met Quincy Jones or Sidney Poitier. I knew there would be excerpts from the show that
people would see, but I wished folks could see me just sitting there, having a meeting with Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee like I belonged there. It was terrific.

Everybody appreciates movie stars and music icons, even people who share their profession. We are all fans, marveling at their mastery over their medium and fascinated by their fame. By the time
I went to Houston, I had met Clive Davis, Miles Davis, and Ossie Davis, and was knocked out for a minute by each one.

By the time I got back to the hotel, I felt ready for half of a Texas meal. I understood that a whole Texas meal was an entire steer and that I would probably have to cook it myself; while I
didn’t see a sign in the room that said “no hot plates or bonfires allowed,” I had no one in mind who might want to eat the other half of a steer, so I started considering
alternatives. Besides, there’s always somebody in those hotels assigned to “watch the band” and I just knew someone would rat me out when I tried to drag my steer up to the fourth
floor. I called room service.

The lady who answered when I called the room service number on the phone had either just started working there minutes before I called, or had perfected a “deniability” telephone
process that even a recording of our conversation could not challenge. By the time I hung up, I had no idea if or when anything was coming and was overwhelmed by a feeling of gratitude for having
been allowed to thank her. I had been reading specific orders from the menu, but may as well have been reading the Yellow Pages backward in Latin. The one thing I remembered her saying quite often
was, “Y’all shore tawk funny, huh?”

She offered to read my order back to me, but I told her I was in my thirties and didn’t think I had that long to live.

There was a slight possibility that the band had arrived while I’d been at the TV studio, but I doubted it. My brother Denis, who was road manager by that time, had been a passenger in one
of the two vehicles that were rented that morning to transport the band while I flew down. There had been a four-door Chevy and a station wagon, eight musicians, and a road manager leaving
Jefferson City, Missouri, for six or seven hours with a meal and under the speed limit.

I had a room list from the desk clerk and dialed my brother’s room but didn’t get him. I put a ball game on my hotel room TV set.

Room service arrived. I have no way of confirming or denying if it was either what I ordered or what I wanted, but by the time it got there I was hungry enough to eat the tray the brother
brought it in on. I do remember giving the brother a lot of money, possibly all I had in my pocket, thanking him for bringing whatever it was and saw that it was a plate from Wal-Mart and a plastic
knife and fork.

People in Texas seem to have tremendous egos, no matter what part of the state they’re in or what part they play in it. Their partisan perspective toward their state was probably
appropriate when they were what they hadn’t yet been told they were not anymore. The thing I enjoyed more than anything else about Texans was their absolute certainty about how glad everyone
should be to be there, where one could be treated to a grand tour of the myths and misinformation all Texans have at their fingertips and recite without provocation like children reciting the
Pledge of Allegiance.

I remember a brother in a bar asking me where I was from, and when I answered New York he told me that Texas had become New York because that was where the biggest and the most of everything
was—in Texas. It had been in New York before Texas “got ‘holt of it.” The “it” Texas had “got ‘holt of” was the part of the conversation I had
missed. Fortunately this almost-a-conversation was taking place after a show, back when I was still drinking, and I wasn’t unhappy about someone else using me to talk to himself.

“It” mighta been the Astrodome. I seemed to have remembered that when they opened the stadium it was called the eighth wonder of the world. Probably by a Texan, I decided. But, hell,
it coulda been oil, which they had mostly run out of, or DFW, the Dallas airport, where every airline had its own terminal. Or space, as in land, which it had more of than anywhere in the States
except Alaska, but who the hell wanted to run around shouting, “We’re number two!”

The brother who’d begun this attack of the similes was continuing unabated, not making any progress toward the point, so I’d waved for another drink and continued in my own
meticulous way to think of things his point might be, feeling that when I thought of it I would know it and have no more need of his confirmation than he seemed to need of me to listen. And then it
hit me: the question must have been “how do you pronounce H-O-U-S-T-O-N?” That was the only New York/Houston conflict there’s been since the Houston Astros and New York Mets were
added to the National League together. The Mets won in ’69. And New Yorkers still called it “House-ton.” The way it was spelled.