And with that said, he went back to finishing his food.
I didn’t say anything, which shocked me, because normally I’m not the quiet type who lets anybody get away with talking to me that way. Normally I would have said a nasty “Fuck you” back. Maybe I would even have gone upside the person’s head for disrespecting me. But I didn’t say anything, much less go upside his head. I just looked at him—probably with a hurt expression on my face—and stayed silent, stunned by his ferocity.
I was also still suffering from a bad case of hero worship, which more than likely had something to do with rendering me mute. Again. The good thing was that only a few people heard how he talked to me that night, not everybody who was there. But those who had heard looked at me with that smug air of disapproval that people assume when someone as famous as Miles “screams on” someone else less famous.
Like, you know, it all had to be my fault. It couldn’t have been his, so why didn’t I just sit my ass down and enjoy being in the man’s presence—without trying to say a word or really interact with him—the way everyone else was doing? But I was so embarrassed, again. He didn’t say another word to me for the rest of the time he was there. But from time to time, I would catch him looking hard and evil at me, and I can tell you, those looks sent shivers up and down my spine. Before I knew it, he was gone again, had slipped out into the night without any fanfare. Like one of his mysterious solos, he was there and then suddenly gone, a wisp of smoke into the night.
the dark years
After that I didn’t speak to Miles for several years. From time to time I would see him sliding around in the darkness of bars and after-hours joints, a drink and cigarette in his hands, dark shades on, usually all in black, whispering into the ears of fine ladies, or huddled with some very suspicious-looking street hustlers.
I ran into him in the elevator of my building again. We were alone, standing side by side, but his cold demeanor warned me not to greet him, and I didn’t. By then I had learned my lesson well. (I remember wondering, though, if this was the way he whipped the musicians in his band into line—by intimidating them?) When he reached his floor, he got off the elevator without acknowledging me. After he left I could still feel the power of the man, the force of his demonic spirit and personality. I was almost happy to see him go.
But it was this same demonic force that propelled his music into magical, powerful, mysterious genius. Whatever I felt about the man, one thing I had learned was certain: up close and personal there was no denying that he possessed an impressive, powerful presence, and whether you liked it or not, he channeled this power into his ever-changing music.
From time to time during the dark years from 1975 to 1980, when Miles was away from music, when he wasn’t even practicing, stories about his sexual orgies, his excessive use of cocaine and alcohol, and his reclusive craziness would drift through the conversations I overheard at bars and parties.
Many of these stories are as comical as they are pathetic. For instance, there was the time when Miles abandoned his Ferrari in the middle of West End Avenue after spotting a policeman he thought was following him. He was so paranoid and high on cocaine that he ran into an apartment building and jumped into an elevator. A startled white woman was already inside the elevator, and when he saw her, he slapped her face and asked her what she was doing in his car. She ran screaming out of the elevator and Miles took it up to the top floor, where he stayed, hiding in the garbage disposal room until late in the evening.
When I would ask my friend Leo about Miles, he would just shake his head and tell me he couldn’t comment on what was happening because of doctor-patient confidentiality. But by the look in Leo’s eyes, I could tell that what was going on with Miles was not good.
the comeback
Fortunately for Miles—and for music—that grim period didn’t last too many years. In early 1980 word began to creep out that Miles was back in the studio recording. This announcement created a tremendous amount of excitement. There was talk of concerts. Miles’ eagerly awaited comeback album, The Man with a Horn, was released later that year. Early in the summer of 1981, Miles played live at a small club called Kix in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Then it was announced that he would be appearing at the 1981 Newport Kool Jazz Festival in New York City. The excitement around this concert reached a fever pitch so quickly that all the tickets were sold in the blink of an eye. And on a hot July night that year, Miles played to a screaming, cheering, standing-room-only audience at Avery Fisher Hall. That concert (along with some music from the Kix engagement and some concerts Miles played later that summer in Japan) is preserved on Columbia’s live recording We Want Miles, which was released in the fall of 1981. Star People was released in 1982, around the time that Miles married actress Cicely Tyson at Bill Cosby’s Massachusetts home. Decoy was released in 1984 and You’re Under Arrest in 1985. That was when I met Miles for the third time. Only this time I was on assignment to write an article about him for Spin magazine.
My interview with Miles had been arranged by a former student of mine from Richmond College, Sandra Trim-DaCosta, who had become the head of publicity for Columbia Records’ jazz division. She set up the interview and arranged to meet me at Miles’ apartment, stressing that I had to get the interview done in an hour and a half.
the spin interview
It was such a great day that I decided to walk through Central Park to get to Miles’ place. It was a beautiful day, a blessed day, the kind of day that the Big Apple’s political leaders use to advertise New York as America’s capital of the arts and center of the financial world. The ads are meant to convince people that the city is a wonderful place to move to and live in.
It was a clear, blue afternoon with a lovely, soft, playful breeze. A day filled with New York’s unsurpassed electric street life: runners and bicyclists racing down all the avenues; picnickers, baseball and soccer games, and lovers lying on the grass in Central Park; lovely women strolling, handsome men sauntering on all the streets. Stylish, hip people everywhere. But halfway to Miles’ place, I decided to go back and get my car because I suddenly realized that I might need it later if I decided to go someplace.
When I arrived at Miles’ apartment building on 79th Street and Fifth Avenue, I was announced by a tall, rotund Latino doorman smiling under a huge, drooping handlebar mustache. I took the elevator up to Miles’ fourteenth-floor apartment full of fearful anticipation. Would Miles remember me and “scream on” me again? Would he ignore me and put me out of his place if he did remember me, as he had done to that unfortunate Time magazine reporter back in the 1960s?
On that well-publicized occasion, Miles had excused himself from the interview after talking to the reporter for about five minutes. When he returned after a short while, the writer had asked about a car horn insistently blowing outside of Miles’ 77th Street townhouse. Miles had turned to the man and said icily, “That’s the cab I called for you a while ago.” That was the time Miles was supposed to be on the cover of Time but was replaced by Thelonious Monk. As the elevator rose, I kept asking myself, “How will he react to me?”
When I got off the elevator and knocked on the door, a young African-American man, his valet, opened the door and let me in. It was dark inside despite the light streaming in from windows that offered a spectacular view of Central Park. A big-screen television set was on, running images of soap-opera actors gushing their idiotic lines while they mugged for the camera. The walls were painted a muted gray, as were the floors. The room reminded me of the inside of a cave. Clothes were thrown haphazardly in a corner and both blue and red trumpets rested on their sides on another table. I saw a photo of Gil Evans standing on a table but there were no photographs of Miles Davis anywhere. Not one of the numerous awards he had won could be seen either, nor were any of his gold or platinum records mounted on the walls.
(I would later ask him where he kept all the awards he had won, and he took me to a closet in his Malibu home and showed them to me. They we
re all dumped into the closet, piled high and collecting dust. “You’re only as good as what you’re playing today,” he would tell me then, “so I can’t be thinking about no awards when I need to have my head into my music.”)
We turned into an alcove off the kitchen and there, in a patch of light beaming in through a back window, sitting at a table drawing figures of a woman onto a sketch pad, was Miles. He was wearing sunglasses in all this darkness. “In character already,” I thought to myself. He was a study in total concentration, his head bent down over his pad; he didn’t even look up.
His valet didn’t disturb him but just stood there, silent, watching and waiting. I could still see the actors mouthing their lines on the television screen. A clock tick-tocked somewhere. Other than that, silence, except for the furious sound of Miles’ pencil moving across his pad.
He was dressed down. There was paint all over his torn black denims and scruffy shirt, paint all over his long, elegant hands and fingers, and paint on his wizened but handsome—almost feminine—face. Tubes of paint were scattered all over the table and on the floor around him. Sheets torn from his pad with half-finished drawings of figures lay crumpled up among the paint tubes. I was really shocked by this total mess, but he didn’t seem to be aware of it, like he wasn’t aware of my presence yet—at least, he wasn’t letting on that he was.
So I just stood there, along with the valet, and watched him drawing feverishly, not saying a word. I was shifting my weight back and forth from my bad left leg (an old basketball knee injury) to my good right one until at last he slowly turned his head toward me. He put down his pencil, took off his glasses, looked at me sideways, kind of slanting his face upwards, and, fixing me with those radar-beacon eyes, said, “Man, you’re a funny lookin’ motherfucka.” Then, squinting through the darkness at my dreadlocked hair, he added, “How’d you get your hair like that?”
I was totally shocked by his response to me. It wasn’t what I had expected. His take on my dreads was kind of country—human—like people back home, like people from anywhere, when they’re being real and not full of bullshit pretensions. It was an honest reaction, something I’m used to, something I prefer, in fact, but I wasn’t expecting anything like it from Miles after my previous encounters with him.
I guess I was expecting him to be harsh and cold, the way he was the last time I saw him. Or hip and cool, the legendary slick man of impeccable style and class, he of the kiss-my-ass attitude, the black Romeo. Or maybe I was expecting the one who had ignored me on the street and had stood beside me in the elevator without saying even one word. The one who had dressed me down for asking why he hadn’t acknowledged me. I was expecting that one, not this normal sort of guy squinting up at me and asking me about my hair.
“Sit down,” he said, pointing at a chair across the cluttered glass table from him. “What do you want to know?”
I sat down and when I looked closer, I noticed that he was wearing a gold and brown hair weave, crushed on the right side, like he had slept on that side during the night. The weave was speckled all over with red, blue, and gold paint. (Later I would discover that this was the way he looked most of the time when he was at home because he was always painting.)
The weave—and the condition it was in—surprised me because either he hadn’t been wearing one the last time I saw him up close or maybe I just hadn’t noticed it. His openness also surprised me because I’d heard how he hated journalists and being interviewed, so I’d come prepared to have my head bitten off. His seemingly casual, open attitude threw me off guard—but I warned myself that the interview hadn’t even begun yet. I proceeded with caution, the way one negotiates a minefield, and tried not to say or do anything stupid. I started to pull out my list of questions, written on a yellow legal pad, already considering how I would frame the first one.
But before I could get my pad out he reached across the table with his long bony fingers, grabbed a long lock of my dreaded hair, and started rolling it around between the ends of two fingertips, asking if it was “for real.” And before I knew what I was doing, I slapped his hand away from my hair and said, controlling my voice as much as possible, “I grew it like this.”
He looked at his hand in disbelief. I felt his valet tense up behind me. (Later I would find out that the valet had earned his black belt in karate.) Then Miles looked at me, both fury and puzzlement in his eyes, and said, “Motherfucka, are you crazy?”
“Naw, I ain’t crazy,” I answered calmly. “But my coming here to do a story on you don’t give you the right to invade my personal space.”
At that he looked at me kind of funny, still puzzled. He was probably debating whether he should kick me out or not. Then he shrugged it off, a hint of a smile flickered around his lips, and he bent back over his pad and started drawing again. I felt the valet relax.
Miles asked me where I was from.
“St. Louis,” I said. “Remember? We met once at Leo Maitland’s.”
“Oh yeah, I remember you now,” he said, looking at me more closely. “You’re that crazy motherfuckin’ poet I cursed out at Leo’s, right?”
“Right,” I said, kind of surprised that he remembered.
“Yeah,” he rasped, not looking up from his drawing, “you’re a crazy motherfucka.” Then his face broke out into a broad smile and he said, “Well, motherfucka, just don’t sit there, ask me some motherfuckin’ questions. What chu want to know, brother?”
And that’s how it started. I believe the closeness between us began developing at that precise moment, on Fifth Avenue, in that apartment, and it remained until his death. I don’t know for sure because we never talked about it. But it’s something I feel deep down in my gut. I think that moment drew me to him and him to me in some strange way. I believe the fact that he liked and respected me had something to do with my slapping his hand away from my hair, something to do with my respect for myself, and my respect for my own space. I believe he related to that because that’s the way he was, at all times.
He respected people who would stand up to him. If you couldn’t or wouldn’t stand up to him, he would—and I was to find this out later—run over you or knock you aside. Miles was always pushing the envelope, testing the parameters, checking the boundaries, both in his art and in his personal relationships. Those who were strong could stick around; those who were weak would run away because they couldn’t stand the constant testing, the constant applications of heat and brutal honesty that Miles doled out. To stay around one had to dish it out as well as take it. Every day. He loved and respected you only if you could stay strong.
Another thing that really opened Miles up to me, I think, came up during that same first interview. He told me that the first professional band he had played in back in St. Louis was Eddie Randle’s Blue Devils, and I told him that Eddie Randle was a cousin of mine. I remember him smiling at me and saying, “No shit!” Then he launched into a long thing about what a good man Eddie Randle was, what a great band he had had, and how much he had learned while he was in that band—about music, about being a band leader, about life. Throughout all of this, he kept saying,
“No shit? Really, you Eddie’s cousin?”
It was true, and after I convinced him with a few well-chosen facts about Eddie—what he looked like, where he lived, that he had been married to an Italian woman for over fifty years, that he owned a very successful funeral home—Miles really opened up to me.
That day I spent ten hours with Miles Davis instead of the hour and a half I had been promised. After Sandra DaCosta arrived and told Miles that the allotted time had passed, he told her he didn’t need her “trying to mother him.” After three hours had passed she said she had to go and he told her to go ahead, that everything was alright. So she did.
He showed me films of old boxing matches of his heroes Sugar Ray Robinson and Joe Louis, played tapes of his music and a few chords on his electric piano, blew a few trumpet notes for me to illustrate a point, talked to my girlfriend, Marg
aret, on the telephone, and when she called him “Mr. Davis” came back at her with, “You can call me Miles.” He cooked for me and asked if I liked his drawings. When I told him I thought that they were rudimentary but interesting, he said, “Really?” looking at me again in that funny, puzzled way that I would grow so accustomed to later on when I would see something knock him off balance.
Throughout all of this friendliness, I must admit I was struggling fiercely with a sweeping sensation of awe. This is me sitting here next to Miles Davis like this? My idol? Talking with him like we are long lost friends, like equals? It was hard to believe it was happening.
He told me, among other things, about the troubles he was having with George Butler and Wynton Marsalis, and that he was thinking of leaving Columbia for Warner. I was shocked to hear this. He had been with Columbia for so long. But he had decided it was time for him to move on, to get a fresh start with a record company that would allow him to play the kind of rockand funk-oriented jazz that he was playing in those days, not to mention whatever else was running through his fertile musical imagination. He told me he was looking forward to the move.
“Plus,” he said with a grin, “they’re gonna give me all the money I need and then some. I’d be a fool not to go, you know what I mean?”
Then he started talking about Wynton Marsalis, though it took him a while to get to the point. He started by saying, “People want to know why Eddie Murphy makes so much money. Hell, they hold all the other actors down. So that when one gets loose, that one makes so much money it’s a shame.”
Miles & Me Page 3