White Bicycles (3 page)
When I returned to Princeton at the end of the 1960 summer holidays prior to my first semester at Harvard, Warwick and Geoff were full of excitement. They had discovered a Philadelphia radio station with a late-night jazz and blues show hosted by Chris Albertson.
We were not
alone!
The revelation on the previous week’s broadcast was that Lonnie Johnson was alive and well and working as a cook in a Philadelphia hotel.
That weekend we played track after track from Johnson’s long discography. Born in New Orleans at the turn of the century, he came up the Mississippi to St Louis and began a career as a crooning blues singer. His music evolved from country blues in the 1920s to an urbane Chicago style in the ’30s and slick ballads in the late ’40s. He was a brilliant and versatile guitarist who recorded duets with white jazz star Eddie Lang and cut dazzling solos with Louis Armstrong’s and Duke Ellington’s orchestras. Listening to his seemingly numberless recordings, we tried to absorb the notion that he was just an hour and a half down US Highway 1, living in obscurity.
A borrowed phone directory revealed
Johnson, Lonnie
at a North Philadelphia address, the blackest area of the city. We dialled the number. ‘Is this Lonnie Johnson? The Lonnie Johnson who recorded “Blue Ghost Blues” in 1938? Yes? Would you come to Princeton and play a concert next week? Yes, I think we can manage fifty dollars.’
We looked at each other in amazement: we had booked Lonnie Johnson! We commandeered a neighbour’s large living room and ordered our friends to attend and bring a dollar each for the kitty. When the day came, we borrowed Geoff’s father’s Rambler and headed for Philly. Outside a downtown hotel, a neatly dressed grey-haired man stood by the kerb with a guitar case and a small amplifier.
Lonnie seemed as pleased to see us as we were to see him. He told of returning from a European tour in 1951 to find that his girlfriend had run off with his money, guitars and record collection. Rock’n’roll was coming in and he didn’t have the energy to fight it; he hadn’t played a gig in eight years. When we reached rural Pennsylvania, Lonnie marvelled at the fireflies in the summer twilight, the trees and green lawns; it had been years since he had been out of the city. He answered our eager questions and laughed gently. When we ogled a girl walking beside the road he added to our teenage lexicon of essential phrases by warning us to beware ‘the fuzzy monster that causes all the trouble’.
When we got to Princeton, the room was full. No one had the faintest idea who he was, but as soon as he picked up his guitar all were entranced. At first Lonnie brushed off requests for blues and sang standards like ‘I Cover The Waterfront’ and ‘Red Sails In The Sunset’. ‘White people always think Negroes just play the blues. I can sing anything.’ There was a beautiful black girl sitting on the floor by his chair and he started singing to her, flirting shyly. As the evening went on and everyone relaxed, the music grew more intense and Lonnie began playing his old blues. Our friends and their parents edged closer to Lonnie’s chair in the middle of the room; none of them had ever heard anything like it.
We collected $100 for him and he was so pleased he took the train home to save us the drive. The following year he would start performing in coffee houses for the young white audiences he met for the first time that night in Princeton. He made a few LPs for Prestige Records, was reunited with Ellington at a New York Town Hall concert, moved to Toronto, where he had the support of some devoted fans, and died in 1970 having added yet another chapter to his remarkable fifty-year career.
For me the experience meant more than just the music and the man: we had imagined something and made it happen so everyone could hear. It was the perfect sequel to the moment a few months earlier when, on a baseball field at Pomfret, my Connecticut boarding school, I had been forced to conclude that I would never star for my beloved Pittsburgh Pirates. Events of the spring season – a lowly .143 batting average, for example – meant that on the Friday before Spring Dance Weekend I was catching fly balls in the outfield while Saturday’s starters took batting practice. My girlfriend wouldn’t even get to see me play! As I pondered this depressing fact, someone in a nearby dorm turned on a radio and the new Fats Domino single, ‘Walking To New Orleans’, echoed across the field.
In that instant, I made a connection that had previously eluded me. It now seems obvious that jazz and blues begat rock’n’roll, but there wasn’t much literature on the subject in those days. Warwick, Geoff and I saw our listening sessions as nerdish and unsexy and not to be discussed in front of outsiders. At parties, like normal teenagers, we jitterbugged to the fast ones and insinuated our knees hopefully between girls’ legs during the slow ones. The contemporary and the historic seemed unrelated. But that spring afternoon, all was suddenly clear:
Fats Domino is
descended from Jelly Roll Morton. Rock’n’roll is the blues!
Popular music is the same stuff I listen to in my room all
the time, only newer. I can be a record producer!
Why a record producer? I had grown up listening to my other grandmother play the piano. Mary Boxall Boyd studied in Vienna with Theodor Leschitizky and assisted Artur Schnabel in pre-First World War Berlin. In the radio transcriptions that remain, she can be heard playing emotional versions of Mozart that sound like Beethoven and Chopin Nocturnes dripping with
ritardandos
: a true Victorian. From age three, I would sit under her grand piano while she practised. She viewed me as a soulmate, the other musical spirit in the family. Despite her Cincinnati upbringing, she thought of herself as a European
manquée
. She had returned to America twice to marry, and both marriages had turned out badly. (Mitigated, of course, by the second having produced my father.) She felt marooned in a cultural wasteland and drew me into viewing myself in the same light.
I took lessons from her until I was thirteen, but never thought of myself as a musician. Listening, however, became part of my being. I had a confident opinion on anything I heard. I loved my parents’ 78s of Marlene Dietrich and Bing Crosby and seized on both rock’n’roll and pre-war jazz and blues when I turned twelve. In the spring of 1960, I had just finished reading Sam Charters’
The Country Blues
, in which Ralph Peer, the pioneering producer who travelled the South recording blues and country singers for the Bluebird label, was portrayed in epic terms. In that
Eureka!
moment, it was clear to me that producing records was not only something I could picture myself doing –
listening for
a living!
– but it would make the Pomfret School starting nine jealous and impress girls. From that day on, I had no doubts: I would be a record producer.
ONE PREJUDICE WARWICK, GEOFF and I claimed to share was a contempt for white blues singers. What could be more ridiculous? When I returned to Harvard in early 1962 after a semester off working for a record company in Los Angeles, I walked into the Café Yana one evening and who should be on stage, singing Lonnie’s ‘Mr Jelly Roll Baker’, but Geoff! I was astounded. His voice was full of the timbres and signature decorations of our vocal heroes: Johnson, Claude Jeter of the Swan Silvertones, Don Redman of McKinney’s Cotton Pickers. I was so shocked it took me half the set to realize he was actually very good. It was a betrayal, but a forgivable one.
The following autumn I took the meagre profits of my record distribution enterprise (wholesaling small blues and folk labels around Boston; the warehouse was under my dormitory bed) and booked one of the newly rediscovered rural blues legends, Sleepy John Estes. I rented the wood-panelled dining room at Harvard’s Eliot House: my first concert promotion. Warwick and Geoff demanded to get in on the act. Eager to re-create the vivid drive with Lonnie Johnson, we planned to pick up Estes and his harmonica player Hammy Nixon on Friday night at the Cornell Folk Festival in Ithaca, New York (their first appearance in front of a white audience), and drive back to Cambridge on Saturday. My vehicle being an unreliable old banger, I blew most of the potential profits renting a car for the occasion.
We got lost on the Cornell campus and by the time we arrived the show – a double bill of Estes and Doc Watson – was over. At the post-gig party, the two men – both blind – sang old hymns shared by the white and black communities of the rural South. We noticed a dark-eyed beauty with a long black braid accompanying the Watson party on fiddle or keeping time with a set of bones. Geoff was too shy to talk to her, but swore he would marry her. It was the young Maria D’Amato, later Maria Muldaur, singer of ‘Midnight At The Oasis’, my biggest hit as a producer.
After a restless night on a faculty apartment floor, we were woken at sunrise by Sleepy John and Hammy anxious to hit the road. They were dressed in threadbare clothes, clutching cardboard suitcases held together by string. We were on the highway in a few minutes, breakfastless. As we passed through Syracuse, Hammy glanced at a clock reading 8.45 and yelled, ‘Stop! There’s a bar over there, and I believe these folkses open up about now.’ Our hopes of hearing stories about Robert Johnson or the Beale Street Sheiks disappeared down the bottles of bourbon we were obliged to buy for each of them. They were drunk by 9.30 and out cold by ten.
I may as well have drunk a few bottles myself for all the acumen I showed when we got to Cambridge. I arranged a spot for them on the live radio broadcast that evening from Club 47 to plug the Sunday night concert. They were so amazing that the local musicians insisted on throwing a party in their honour. Eric Von Schmidt gave them each another bottle of whiskey and we invaded a large house in Newton belonging to a girl whose parents were wintering in Florida. They played for hours, people kept giving them drinks, and eventually they both passed out. At the height of the soirée, there must have been two hundred people there, the core audience I was counting on to buy tickets. By Sunday morning they had all heard their fill of Sleepy John Estes and just wanted to stay home and recuperate. All agreed it was the best party of the year but I lost a fortune – over $100.
I repeated the experiment with Big Joe Williams a few months later, but despite lessons learned, his visit was almost as stressful as Estes’. I was beginning to grasp some of the recurring themes in my life: the tension when artists from a poverty-stricken community confront the spoiled offspring of the educated middle class and the conflict between the latter’s desire to hear the ‘real thing’ and the former’s desire to be ‘up to date’. Hearing traditional musicians when they first emerge from their own communities is a wonderful experience but impossible to repeat: the music is inevitably altered by the process of ‘discovery’.
Around this time, I came to the notice of Joan Baez’s manager and Boston’s leading concert promoter, Manny Greenhill. I got only a brusque nod when our paths first crossed and flattered myself that he saw me as a young rival, so I was surprised when he rang me up and asked whether I would look after Jesse Fuller, who was coming to town for a couple of gigs and a recording session. Manny proposed paying me $25 plus expenses to keep him on time and sober. In the student economy of October 1963, particularly when the student was funding a precarious business out of his shallow pockets and waiting on tables at the Adams House cafeteria for a dollar an hour, it was too good to refuse.
When I met Fuller at the bus station, I reminded him of our earlier encounter during my semester working in Los Angeles for his previous label, Contemporary Records. Jesse was famous for ‘San Francisco Bay Blues’ – a part of virtually every young folkie’s repertoire – and drew a good crowd at Club 47. After he opened for Bob Dylan at the Brandeis Folk Festival on Saturday, I took him to a recording session with producer Paul Rothchild for Prestige – an entire LP in one Sunday afternoon session. I helped Paul keep track of the takes and gave him some tips on Jesse’s repertoire, which I knew backwards by then. I also solved the problem of a squeak in his foot-operated bass contraption by greasing the pedal with oil from a can of tuna – the only lubricant to be found on a quiet Sunday in pre-mall Boston. Paul mentioned my resourcefulness to Greenhill.
In January, as I contemplated my impending mid-year graduation from Harvard, I paid a call on Manny. I was determined to go to Europe, the Promised Land where the music I loved was appreciated. I fantasized that I would support myself by writing articles for English jazz and blues magazines, trumping the local journalistic talent with my fresh American perspective. (I would later meet contributors to
Jazz Journal
and
Jazz Monthly
and discover that the standard pay was £5 per article.) I would hustle tours for American folk and blues artists. I would be a middleman, an
éminence grise
, a role to which I had aspired ever since I had first understood the expression. Could Manny use my services?
He heard me out, then picked up the phone and called George Wein in New York. ‘Hey, George, you know that English Blues and Gospel Caravan thing you booked Brownie and Sonny for in April? Have you found a tour manager for it yet?’ He put his hand over the mouthpiece and eyed me. ‘Can you be in New York tomorrow morning?’
The day after my meeting with Wein, I reported for work at his New York office and set about finalizing the tour line-up and writing a press release. Basically a jazz man, George was bemused by my vehemence over the choice of sidemen and let me get on with it as long as I didn’t go over budget. After a week on Warwick’s sofa (he was attending Columbia) I went back to Harvard to take my final exams.
Finishing university meant I was prey to the Selective Service Organization, otherwise known as the Draft Board. I was duly summoned to meet a chartered bus in Princeton early one morning in February ’64 and taken to Newark for a physical. With me were about twenty-five mostly familiar faces: some I knew from grade school, some were friends of my brother’s, some had been team-mates or opponents in the summer baseball league. Most were from the Neapolitan or black communities in Princeton. I sensed I was probably the only one on the bus with a letter from his doctor about flat feet and a bad back. Years later, when visiting the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, I wondered whether the inscribed names included any of my fellow passengers from that day.