by Rose, Al;
Since it takes me no time to get to sleep, I’d gotten a full hour of shut-eye when a sudden loud and eerie noise set me rigidly upright in bed. I went through the process of satisfying myself that I was in a motel room. A little added attentiveness retrieved for me the fact that I was in Manassas. And with the noise level increasing as it was, I deduced that someone had broken into Condon’s room and was in the process of pulling his fingernails out.
I immediately put on my bathrobe and charged out into the frigid night to rescue our little friend from the demented attackers. Once outside, I noted that Bob Greene, too, had emerged from his room. We faced each other in front of Condon’s door and I tried the knob. No dice. Bob knocked. The painful groans and screeches continued unabated. I stepped back, preparatory to charging the door with the intent of breaking it down. Just as I was about to make my initial lunge, we saw Phyllis, Eddie’s wife, coming our way down the walk and carrying what looked like an overnight bag.
“Good morning, boys,” she greeted us, reacting not a tittle to the howls and screams we knew she couldn’t help hearing. “Trouble getting to sleep?”
“Eddie’s in trouble!” Bob shouted excitedly.
Phyllis had her room key out. “No,” she said calmly. “He’s all right. He’s just singing. He sings in his sleep.” Phyllis explained that she was the one who always checked them in at hotels. Without telling Eddie, she always rented an extra room so she could get some sleep, too. Then, early in the morning, she would join him in his room and he would never know the difference.
We still insisted on looking inside after she opened the door, just to make sure that this time it wasn’t mayhem instead of music. We saw Eddie, flat on his back, still fully dressed, emitting these terrifying sounds. Having satisfied ourselves that he was indeed alone, we left Phyllis with him and returned to our rooms. The last thing I said to Bob was, “Everybody Loves My Baby.”
We met Eddie in the coffee shop at noon, and I began to report to him the events of the early morning. Halfway through the recital, he interrupted, turned in his chair, and stared squarely into my face. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded.
Now it’s true that we hadn’t seen each other for many years, and it’s also true that in that long interval my appearance had changed far more than his. I said, “Wake up, Eddie. I’m Al Rose.”
He said, “The hell you are! Al Rose is a tall, skinny guy with glasses—and he’s got no beard! Who the hell arc you?”
Bunny Berigan
By 1937, Bunny Berigan had already hit the big time. He was still playing with Tommy Dorsey, but the fans had begun to note his name. And among his peers he had achieved optimum status as a sideman.
What we did together, mainly, was drink. We had our favorite places in the Village. He wasn’t a very social person and didn’t associate much with other musicians. He wanted to talk about philosophy, infinity, psychology, or anything else that made him feel he was untangling the riddles of the universe. He wanted to know why he, or anybody else for that matter, was alive, and whether it was worth it. These considerations often made him irritable, and his impatience with the stupidity around him was ever apparent.
He was always looking for quiet places where there was no music—places where one could talk. Although we shared an avid interest in the opposite sex, we never went on double dates. Our forays into the saloon life of downtown New York were always “between dates.”
Bunny’s custom was to carry several packages of chewing gum in his pocket, not because he was addicted to the vigorous mastication of chicle. He had an even more practical use for the stuff. He’d put three or four sticks of gum in his mouth as we approached a boite with liquor in mind. Once inside, we’d sit at the bar and order our drinks. Then he’d excuse himself, promising to come back in a moment. He would walk purposefully off, to the men’s room I assumed incorrectly. Early on I discovered that what he was doing was finding the jukebox, putting a wad of Wrigley’s Doublemint through the coin slot, then pushing the slide in to assure the device’s inoperability for at least as long as we’d be there enjoying our drinks. He’d return to the bar secure and relaxed in the knowledge that our ears wouldn’t be assaulted by bad music. Later on I took to doing that myself.
Bunny had a statement to make on that entire subject. “There’s no reason in the world why some stupid son-of-a-bitch with a nickel should have the right to impose his tastes on a room full of people.”
During the late thirties most big cities had one hotel with an entire floor reserved for the personnel of the big dance bands that succeeded each other week after week at the main theater or night spot in town. In New York it was the Manger (now renamed the Taft); in Chicago, the Stevens; in Cleveland, the Morrison; in Philadelphia, the Ritz-Carlton. Bellhops, prostitutes, and liquor vendors took a great interest in knowing which band was “in” during any given week. A sedate group like, for example, Sammy Kaye’s, traveled with wives, played bridge, and created a kind of mobile suburbia—no whores, very little alcohol, no festivity. That meant reduced increments for the hotel force and the local ladies of the evening.
There were a couple of celebrated bands in that era that were composed entirely of gays. (They didn’t call them “gays” in those days.) The leader of one of these, who happened to be straight himself and well-known for his unusual trombone solos, explained that it was easier to travel with a gay band. They rarely got in any trouble and usually just hung around in the hotel together. It’s no secret in the hotel business that gays don’t tip very well as a rule.
But the purveyors of the elemental vices always had a field day when Berigan came to town. Then you needed a written pass to get off the elevator at their floor. Some of the most orgiastic nights of my life were spent in this select company in New York and Philadelphia. Those evenings gave me a new slant on living. How the musicians survived through an entire tour, with every night given over to this sort of merrymaking after putting in a gruelling night’s work, I’ll never know. There were a few other bands that followed this pattern. Wingy Mannone’s was considered to be runner-up to Berigan’s in free-style high jinks. For a brief spell a crew led by Johnny “Scat” Davis screamed like a comet through the beds of the nation’s hostelries. Gene Krupa’s band earned an honorable mention from bell captains everywhere. But with them, Berigan reigned supreme.
Berigan never really made it economically with his band, despite his enormous success with his theme, “I Can’t Get Started.” He had no business sense whatever and he was a soft touch for anybody with a hard-luck story. Drummer George Wettling played with that band at its peak. He once said to me, “You see, it’s possible for as smart a guy as Berigan not to have any sense at all.”
Bunny died in 1942 while in the employ of Tommy Dorsey. They called it pneumonia, but he really died from not having any sense. But there’s no doubt he had some great ideas. I still carry chewing gum.
Alvin Alcorn
The year was 1976—the American Bicentennial. Alvin Alcorn and I sat on the deck of a bateau in the Seine and I said, “Back in the late thirties—I think that must be when we first met—could you have dreamed that one day we’d be sitting here on a boat in Paris with you telling me that you and the band had to fly back to Louisville tomorrow to play for the Kentucky Derby but that you’d be back here in Paris on Monday?”
“You didn’t do no flyin’ nowhere in them days, let alone across the ocean!” he reminded me. “And lookit you! You be goin’ with Averty to the National Palace to autograph books for the president…. And you don’t even play nothin’.”
I pursued the pleasant subject. “And parading down the Champs Elysees with fourteen New Orleans style jazz bands? What a week! Speeches, TV cameras, thousands in the streets.”
Alvin just shook his head and said, “We must have done somethin’ right.”
The Republic of France was celebrating Louisiana Week. Alvin, with his Imperial Brass Band, and I were guests-of-honor through an endless series of excit
ing events. There were a few other Americans around. Rotund Phil Johnson, WWL’s television newsman, displayed unexpected agility running the streets with his shoulder camera, making what would become an award-winning documentary. There was impresario John Shoup, looking dazed and happy with his part in organizing the celebration. And I thanked my stars for one-time sax player Pierre Salinger, who came to my rescue when I got stage fright while presenting the Key to the City of New Orleans to Madame Jacqueline Boudrier, the Minister of Communications of France. I lost confidence in my rusty French, and Salinger, magnificently bilingual, translated my remarks to the distinguished audience.
Through this hectic week, Alcorn surveyed the scene as impassively as a sphinx. The years, which seem never to age him, had put him in countless unexpected situations—like playing a bit in a James Bond movie. In the first scene of Live and Let Die, Alcoorn sidles quietly beside an unsuspecting parade watcher and sticks a knife in his ribs. After that we called him the “Baby Faced Killer.”
He and his band joined my wife Diana and me at Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C, in 1980 to supply the music for the opening of our traveling exhibit, “Played with Immense Success,” which toured under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution through the three subsequent years. (That was a social history of New Orleans from 1840 to 1940 as shown in its published sheet music. Diana and I wrote the text with Vaughn Glasgow of the Louisiana State Museum.)
Alvin looks like a sun-tanned “Poppin’ Fresh, Pillsbury Doughboy.” He’s got more friends and is more respected than any other musician in New Orleans. When I have guests visiting me and I’m showing the Crescent City off, Alvin is always on my tour. I think the guest who enjoyed him the most was my late friend Louis Alter, whom I took to Commander’s Palace for Sunday brunch so Alvin could play a tune Louis wrote. Alvin put his mute an inch from Alters ear and whispered his version of “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans.” Alter, though he’d written the piece thirty-five years earlier, had never been in the city before. When he got back to New York he wrote me a letter in which he said, “Now I know what it means to miss New Orleans.”
Way back in 1954, during a rehearsal for a recording session of the Papa Celestin Orchestra, I said to Papa, “The ‘Li’l Liza Jane’ piece is going to need a hot trumpet chorus, probably. Are you going to play it?”
He answered, “No. I got Alvin Alcorn comin’ in to do that. When I make records, I need to have a real trumpet player.”
Alvin’s professional attitude is relaxed. When you play music for a living you have to perform some real garbage. But Alvin always loved to play genuine New Orleans jazz with a half-dozen of the city’s finest on a record session. We had one such afternoon in the Royal Orleans Hotel’s luxurious Esplanade Room, which manager Archie Casbarian had thoughtfully made available to us. I was producing one of the records for the State of Louisiana Department of Commerce and Industry series. We had on hand not only Alvin, but trombonist Wendell Eugene, Harry Shields on clarinet, and a matchless rhythm section consisting of Armand Hug on the piano, Danny Barker on the guitar, Chester Zardis playing bass, and Josiah “Cie” Frazier on drums. We opened with “Wang Wang Blues,” all driving rhythm and tight ensemble play. When it was over, Alvin set his trumpet down and said, “That’s what we used to call jazz!”
Muggsy Spanier
The Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans is world famous for its cancer research and for alerting the nation to the extreme dangers of tobacco. Smoking, of course, is not permitted in the hospital. Dr. Alton B. Ochsner was very specific on that point.
Muggsy Spanier, the great jazz trumpet star, though his entire musical career was spent outside the South—Chicago, New York, and California—headed for New Orleans when he was in need of physical rehabilitation. It is to that fact that we owe such recorded classic blues titles as “Relaxin’ at the Touro,” which pays its respects to the renowned Touro Infirmary where I, as well as scores of other jazzmen, was born.
The last time Muggsy was with us, during the sixties, he was ensconced in a prime room at Ochsner; and whatever his symptoms, he was in the best of spirits. Edmond Souchon and I visited him shortly after he was admitted. After he asked me to shut the door the very first thing he did was to fish into his bathrobe and come up with a package of cigarettes and some matches.
“This is the last pack I’ve got,” he told us. “They took away all I had in my suitcase. They’ve got a smoking rule in this place. I don’t know how I’m gonna get through the next ten days.”
I tried to get him off the subject, asking him how he liked living in Sausalito. He told me of the glories of California’s Garden of Eden. I asked him if he ever saw Henry Miller, whom we both knew from New York, and he said he’d seen him a time or two. Then he told Sou a hair-raising story of a time nearly twenty years earlier when I’d called him at the Picadilly Hotel in New York, where he was living, to ask him to book a room for the weekend for the refugee playwright, Ernst Toller. Toller had fled his native Austria after having been, for a brief period, through a freak of circumstances, the dictator of Bavaria. New York was full of conventions, and there was not a room to be found. I had been delegated by a mutual friend to secure housing for this man who had a hit show on Broadway at the time entitled “Reunion in Vienna.” It just happened that Muggsy was going to be out of town himself that week-end and he generously offered to let the author use his room. He’d warned me that the place might not be too neat, but said he’d notify the desk clerk to give me the key.
I brought Toller to the Picadilly, took him up to Muggsy’s digs, and left. By the time I got down to the lobby in the elevator, Toller had made it a faster way—jumping the fourteen or so floors from Muggsy’s window to the sidewalk below. I saw the mob in the street when I left the hotel, but never suspected that the playwright, whom I had just met that evening, had chosen that moment to end his life. I read about it in the papers the next morning.
Muggsy called me soon afterwards and said, “Don’t bring me any more of your friends.” Muggsy was a good storyteller and Sou was fascinated.
We had a friendly, pleasant visit. But as we prepared to go, Muggsy said, “If you guys are really my friends, one of you will smuggle a carton of butts in to me before you leave. I’ll die in this joint without cigarettes!”
For me the request posed an obvious ethical dilemma. While I was weighing in my mind the rights and wrongs involved, Sou, who was an eminent physician, said, “Wait a minute. I’ll be right back.”
He returned some fifteen minutes later carrying a well-camouflaged carton of cigarettes and handed them to Muggsy with a conspiratorial grin. Muggsy immediately hid the carton under his blanket. We said goodbye, promising to come back soon for another visit. When we were back in Sou’s car I asked, “Do you really think it was right to bring him those cigarettes?”
“I’ll tell you,” he said, “but don’t let it go any further. The cigarettes now won’t make any difference. I’d do anything for him that will make him more comfortable.”
Not too long after that I had further reason to respect Sou’s diagnostic abilities.
Wild Bill Davison
They don’t call him “Wild Bill” for nothing.
The reference is not to his playing style, which has won him an international following for the past forty-five years or so. He’s just, well, wild. The oldest incorrigible brat in the jazz world, his misdemeanors were magnified exponentially when George Brunies was still alive to urge him on to more heinous atrocities. According to most recent advices, Davison, at eighty, has lost neither the drive nor the obstinacy that made him famous and infamous, respectively.
Wild Bill is a genuine scholar in American history, with a specialty in the Civil War, about which he knows absolutely everything. I had occasion to observe the depth of that interest at three o’clock one very frigid February morning in Manassas, Virginia. We were all staying at the Downtowner Motor Inn to participate in Johnson McCree’s annual jazz bash. Needless to
say, most of us were asleep after an exhausting day. It was in 1970—the year after Eddie Condon roused me and Bob Greene by singing in his sleep. I’d have thought that at the age of sixty-four, Wild Bill would have known better than to appear on the balcony in 7° weather, clad only in his boxer shorts, to play a very loud trumpet solo of “I Wish I Was in Dixie.”
Stephane Grappelle doesn’t speak much English, and my French needs too much help. But we both remember when, a half-century earlier, Django Reinhardt interpreted for us in Paris. Django’s English wasn’t much either, but he and I both spoke Spanish. Photo by Johnny Donnels.
John Hammond, left, never looked this bleary-eyed. The fellow on the right was Glenn Miller’s main male warbler, Ray Eberle. Photo by Nick Alexakis.
An afternoon in the fifties in Joe Mares’s alligator warehouse. Kneeling, from left to right, are Martin Abraham, Jr. (“Little Chink Martin”); Martin Abraham, Sr. (“Chink Martin”); Stanley “Happy” Mendelson; and Raymond Burke. Standing, left to right, are Harry Shields, “Li’l Abbie” Brunies, Jack Delaney, Joe Mares, Al Rose, Sharkey Bonano, Tony Parenti, and Armand Hug. Photo by John Kuhlman.
Mayor Moon Landrieu of New Orleans, reading the dirty parts of Storyville, New Orleans to, from left to right, Armand Hug, Raymond Burke, Danny Barker, Al Rose, and George Deville. Photo courtesy of Winston Lill.