White Bicycles (6 page)
They were listening as well, often standing in the wings during each other’s sets: I spotted Rosetta there during Reverend Gary’s rendition of ‘Precious Lord’. Sonny and Gary were heard working something out one evening in a dressing room and the next night Sonny joined him on ‘The Sun Is Going Down’. The cry of the harmonica added even more intensity to what was already a chilling and emotional song and brought tears to a few eyes in the audience.
In Manchester, producer Johnny Hamp – inventor of
Ready Steady Go!
and
6.5 Special
– set us up at a disused railway station with fake bales of cotton for Brownie and Sonny and a dolly to film Muddy walking down ‘that lonesome railroad track’. The National Film Theatre periodically dredges up programmes from the archives of British television and screened the show a few years ago. I had never seen it and it was very affecting to watch all those great – and, by 1999, late – singers and musicians. Towards the end, when Rosetta gets the audience clapping along (mostly on the wrong, or white person’s, beat), I glimpsed my twenty-one-year-old self in the background, clapping! I never clap along. It has always been against my principles of
éminence grise
-ness, but the camera doesn’t lie. On the right beat, mind you.
In Liverpool Tom and I met a West Indian blues fan who gave us a matchbox filled with marijuana he said had been cured for two years with rum and molasses by Rastafarians in a cane stalk buried in the hills above Kingston, Jamaica. After the Leicester concert the following night, Tom, Gary, Otis and I smoked some in the back of the bus and every time we went over a bump or around a bend we got higher and higher. When we arrived in Sheffield, Cousin Joe had to take over the hotel check-in and guide us to our rooms.
We swung back through London for dates at Hammersmith and Croydon, then headed for the home stretch: an evening in the Brighton Dome followed by a show in Paris for French television. By this time, wary rivals had become ardent fans of each other’s music. Rosetta told me that Gary was ‘the deepest man I have ever met’ while even the dour Russell was seen joking with Cousin Joe and Muddy.
As Paris would be an abbreviated show in front of a small studio audience, Brighton, we all felt, was the finale. There was an electric atmosphere that evening, beginning at the sound check. After each introduction, I would run to the back of the hall to listen. Otis’s solo spot that night gave the audience a capsule history of boogie-woogie and barrelhouse piano. Cousin Joe’s anecdotes and songs were hilarious while Rosetta tore into her guitar solos and extended them for chorus after chorus, lifting the audience out of their seats with ‘Didn’t It Rain?’
During the intermission she asked me for an offstage microphone when Gary sang ‘Precious Lord’. ‘I don’t want to take anything away from him,’ she said. I coiled the mic cable and left it beside her in the wings as Gary came out to start the second half. When he picked out the opening chords of ‘Precious Lord’, Rosetta began to moan. She was back in that little country church in Arkansas with her mother, singing in a primitive style I had never heard from her. Gary lifted his head and murmured, ‘Oh Lord, sing it, girl!’ Her interjections seemed to transport him to another time and place, re-creating music that few white people had ever been privileged to hear.
By the time Muddy hit the stage, the Dome was levitating. When he got out his slide and started caressing the strings under ‘another mule kicking in my stall’ he appeared possessed, evoking the ghosts of Robert Johnson and Charlie Patton. Then he attacked ‘Mojo Working’, got the audience dancing in the aisles and propelled them out into the night. (In those days, theatres didn’t destroy the music lingering in people’s heads by playing records as soon as the show ends.)
At Orly airport tears were shed, addresses and phone numbers exchanged. Everyone wanted to do it again in the States. I felt confident it could be arranged, but the following winter I discovered how little interest it held for American concert promoters. Brighton would never be repeated. In years to come, Muddy took his (full) band around the world, recorded with Jimmy Page and got hugged onstage by Mick Jagger. Brownie, Sonny and Gary plied the folk circuit until they got too old to carry on. Rosetta kept touring even after she lost a leg. Cousin Joe went back to his bar in New Orleans and occasionally toured Europe. An era in American culture was passing and I had only the barest idea of how lucky I was to have witnessed the flash of the sunset.
The blues boom of the sixties marked the end of the natural life of the form. The British taught white Americans how to love their native music and the sudden enthusiasm of college kids seemed to be enough for most black audiences to decide it was time to move on. The black bourgeoisie was already ashamed of it and soul and Motown drew the rest away. By the end of the sixties, most blues artists were performing – if at all – for white audiences only.
In the mid-sixties, love of the blues united much of the American folk and English pop worlds. Most folk singers’ repertoire included at least one song learned from a Leadbelly or Big Bill Broonzy record, while a large percentage of English pop groups started life as blues bands. Pink Floyd are named after Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, two obscure singers from rural South Carolina whose names appeared in the liner notes of a Blind Boy Fuller reissue. Every rediscovery of an old man whose name graced the labels of our treasured 78s from the ’20s or ’30s was greeted with huge excitement. With astonishing speed, however, blues became a cliché. By the ’70s, lurching, screaming – or, worse, polite – guitar solos poured forth from bar bands and heavy metal groups and decorated overproduced singles by mainstream pop singers. Blues phrasing now permeates most popular music: the ultimate postmodern artefact, complete with quotation marks.
Thirty years after Brighton, I walked sadly away from the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Fair. It was everything my twenty-one-year-old self might have dreamed of: 75,000 people packed into the Fairgrounds, with NPR-subscriber bags holding expertly marked programmes. America’s black musical heritage was on parade across two long weekends and eight stages. But the audience was almost entirely white. The performers had learned their lessons, dropping any modernizations or slick showbiz gestures and recreating the old-time styles the sophisticated audiences craved. On one level, it demonstrated respect for a deep culture and a rejection of shallow novelty. But removed from the soil in which it grew the music felt lifeless, like actors portraying characters who happened to be their younger selves. In two days wandering from stage to stage, I heard little I recognized as music.
The festival’s big attraction, Aretha Franklin, left the ‘Who’s Zoomin’ Who’ spangles at home and sang her great sixties hits from a piano bench. For about thirty seconds, I was thrilled. But she and the audience seemed to know exactly what was coming next. Waves of self-congratulatory affection passed back and forth between them: she claiming credit for recognizing what they wanted to hear; the audience adoring themselves for being so hip as to want the ‘real thing’. The music was caught in the middle, lifeless and predictable. Nothing that weekend bore any resemblance to what I heard in the town halls of England in April 1964 or on those unforgettable nights sitting a few feet from great masters who were not yet savvy enough to be anything other than real.
ON MY FIRST DAY AT WORK for George Wein in January 1964, I was assigned a spare desk in his Central Park West office, a large ground-floor room in an imposing building that no jazz promoter could afford today. Midmorning, the buzzer sounded and Thelonious Monk was admitted wearing his famous black astrakhan cap, a heavy woollen overcoat and gloves. Everyone greeted him and George waved vaguely in my direction, saying, ‘That’s our new kid over there, Joe.’ Monk turned and looked in my direction. Without taking off his coat, hat or gloves, he advanced slowly across the room. After what seemed a long time, he stood looming over me. I rose hesitantly. He took off one glove, gently clasped my hand, looked me in the eye and said softly, ‘How you feeling?’ Neither awaiting nor expecting a reply, he turned and started talking to Joyce Wein and I went back to phoning bass players in Chicago.
I was as excited about jazz then as I was about blues. When George invited me to work for the autumn 1964 Newport Jazz in Europe tour, I borrowed money to last the summer in London until I went back on the payroll.
The European jazz world had an aura of wealth and elegance in those days. Promoters lived expansively, their fortunes mostly inherited or earned elsewhere. I started moving in this rarefied world at the height of the post-war success of jazz. I crossed the Channel by ferry and motorcycle in early August, having spent the summer on friends’ sofas and floors. Arriving in Paris after midnight, I made my way to George’s home-from-home, the luxurious Hôtel Prince de Galles. The concierge regarded me with horror: I was covered in grease and my goggles were spattered with bugs. By the morning, I was scrubbed clean and ready to join this other world.
At lunchtime we walked up the street to Fouquet’s on the Champs Elysées to meet Philippe Koechlin, editor of
Jazz Hot
, and tell him about the line-up of the autumn tour. It included Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, the Charlie Parker All-stars with Sonny Stitt, JJ Johnson and Howard McGhee, Roland Kirk, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Original Tuxedo Brass Band from New Orleans, the George Russell Sextet and the Coleman Hawkins/Harry Edison Swing All-stars: eight bands, six different itineraries and four tour managers. I spoke a reasonable amount of French but fearful of finding something unfamiliar on my plate I ordered
‘entrecôte bien
cuit avec pommes frites’
. On our way back to the hotel, George put his arm on my shoulder and said, ‘Kid, if you’re going to work for me, you gotta learn how to eat.’ Over the next three evenings, we went to Michelin-starred restaurants where George turned my palate around, ordering three courses for me with wines to match.
George had to stretch a bit to put an arm on my shoulder. He is short, stout and balding, a caricature of the cigar-chomping promoter. In fact, he plays very much against type (and doesn’t smoke cigars). For a start, he is an accomplished jazz pianist. He horrified his clothier father by turning his back on the family business to pursue his musical obsessions. By the time he was thirty, he had opened the Storyville jazz club in Boston and married Joyce, not only not a Jewish girl, but black besides. His enthusiasm created the Newport Jazz Festival in the ’50s and his determination brought it back to life in the sixties after beer-fuelled riots had run it out of town. This was his first attempt to establish that franchise in Europe. His motivation was part economic, part egotistical and part gastronomic. George loved nothing more than eating his way through the
Guide Michelin
from Paris to the Riviera and back and this way there was a business justification for the trip.
One of his partners in the venture had a Paris flat with a jumble of Degas, Matisse and Bonnard canvases on the walls. We went often to the Blue Note club off the Champs Elysées, where a couple of girls sat alone with champagne on ice and an empty chair extending an expensive invitation. You couldn’t have dreamed up an atmosphere more remote from an English pub – or, for that matter, a New York jazz club.
When a crisis arose over the discount fares deal with Air France, George summoned me to meet him at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes. We lay on the beach phoning travel agents and promoters from red telephones on forty-foot wires while waiters brought us drinks and lunch. One evening he took me into the hills to have a drink at the Colombe d’Or in St-Paul-de-Vence. George was explaining the history of the Matisse and Picasso sketches on the wall and toasting the huge photo of the latter behind the bar when I gave him a nudge. Pablo himself was seated on the terrace in the evening sun, holding court at a table with six beautiful women and one small boy. His shirt was off, he looked powerful and bronzed and the women never took their eyes off him.
From my
hôtel particulier
near the Trocadéro I ‘advanced’ the tour, booking hotels and local flights and arranging press interviews. In the evenings I would zoom around Paris on the motorbike, hanging out in the Café Seine off the Boulevard St-Germain with a crowd of expat jazzmen and would-be Bohemians. Those relaxed weeks were needed to build up a credit balance: once the tour started I would rarely get more than four hours’ sleep a night and found myself under constant threat of disaster.
The problems began in Berlin on the first day of the tour. The European promoters had insisted on adding Roland Kirk to the line-up, but the budget was tight and George refused to book Kirk’s band as well. He packaged him on a bill with the Parker All-stars so he could share their rhythm section of Tommy Potter and Kenny Clarke. It was a great opportunity for Kirk, but he hated performing without his regular musicians. As a compromise, he was allowed to add a European pianist he had worked with before, the Catalan Tété Montoliu. We knew that Roland was blind and would be accompanied by his wife, but we didn’t realize Montoliu was blind as well and would thus require
his
wife to come along too. Tour budgets were on a knife-edge and this meant more air fares, double rooms and per diems.
Roland’s group assembled for the first time on the afternoon of the opening show. Potter and Clarke were old-school bop musicians. They (like George) viewed Roland’s playing three saxes at once as a gimmick and they had even less use for his complicated time signatures. But Roland had spent the morning with Tété working out stripped-down adaptations of his arrangements. When they started to play them backstage, the other two just laughed. This was a one-night stand tour: ‘Just name a few standards, choose your keys, and tap your foot for the tempo,’ said Tommy.
The first two dates passed without incident, but mutual frustration was building. On the third day, I put Rosetta and the Tuxedo Band on a plane from Hamburg to Zurich, then flew the short hop to Bremen, where I picked up the Parker All-stars and Roland. In Zurich, we met the Hawkins/Edison group coming in from Frankfurt and I put them on a plane to Geneva, where another tour manager would meet them. I got Roland and the All-stars to the concert hall then boarded a train with Rosetta and the Tuxedos to Berne for a concert that night. Back in Zurich after the show there was a mailbox full of messages, most of them reading, ‘Be sure to speak to me before you talk to anyone else…’