During the summer of 1989, Steve and I went out to Miles’ house in Malibu to tape him. Miles’ family was visiting. His sister Dorothy, his brother Vernon, and his nephew Vincent were there—by this time Dorothy and Vincent had patched up their bad feelings with Miles over his firing of Vincent. I knew all of them from having worked on the autobiography—I had finished the book in October of 1988—so when we first got there everything went real well. Dorothy had cooked a meal and we all ate together. Miles and I were kidding around. Everything seemed to be going great, except that from the first moment we walked in, I could tell Miles didn’t like Steve Rowland. He just didn’t like him. Miles was like that; he could dislike someone at the drop of a hat. He either liked or disliked you instantly, and there was nothing that you could do when he had it in for you. Later, Miles told me that he didn’t like Steve’s vibe. But he overcame his initial dislike and decided to go ahead with the interview, although by then, I knew Miles well enough to sense that we were in for trouble.
We started out with me interviewing Vincent. Miles’ sister and brother declined to be interviewed for the show. Then it was Miles’ turn. Now, first of all, you have to remember how much Miles hated to be interviewed, even by me. But he had managed to put his dislike aside and was doing it as a favor to me. Everything started well, with me asking him questions and him answering with verve and humor. Then, about half an hour into it, I saw Steve’s forehead wrinkling with concern as he listened to the sound through his headphones while he was twisting the knobs of his tape recorder. He seemed agitated about something. Knowing that Steve was a perfectionist about any little disturbance in the sound balance, I began to get worried that he would stop the interview because of some technical problem or other, which I knew would upset Miles and possibly end the interview. So I frevently hoped Steve wouldn’t do that.
All of a sudden, I saw him taking off his headphones and walking over to where we were sitting. Miles was smiling at me when Steve came over and didn’t see him approaching. When Steve got there, he told us we had to stop because there was “a little glitch” in the sound that was coming through. Miles looked at him and I saw a dark cloud of fury gathering in his face. Vince, sitting close by, saw it, too. I watched his face kind of flinch with concern. Then Miles said something like, “Well, you’re an engineer, aren’t you? Why can’t you wipe it out after we get through talking? What’s the big problem here?”
“I just want it to be perfect, Miles,” Steve said. “So could we just pick up somewhere in the middle of the last question? You think you could remember what you said before? Because that was a great answer, man!”
Miles looked at me and then at Vince as Steve walked back to his tape recorder and put his headphones back on. Then Steve gave me a signal to begin, which I did by asking the same question again. Miles looked real pissed off. He answered the question, though not as well as he had before. But about five minutes into the interview—I could see it coming—Miles ripped off his headphones and called a halt to the proceedings. He said he wanted to talk with me, privately. I looked at Steve with a look that said, “I told you so” on my face, and I followed Miles, who was walking down the hall in the direction of his garage. When I caught up with him he turned, looked me straight in the eyes with that fierce gaze of his, and said, “What’s wrong with your boy?”
“Well, Miles,” I began, “you know, you make some people nervous. Plus, Steve just wants to make it good, that’s all.”
“He can clean that shit up in the studio, man. Why he fucking with me and you like that? It’s disrespectful. I don’t like the motherfucka anyway, never did, never will. He’s got to go, and I mean right now. You can stay. We gonna have dinner, watch some movies, listen to some of my new tapes, OK? But that motherfucka’s got to go.”
He said that with intense finality. But I countered with, “Well, you know, Miles, I drove both of us out here, so Steve doesn’t have a way to get back to Los Angeles.”
Without blinking an eye or missing a beat, he shot back with, “Well, you go, too, and come back either later or tomorrow. But that motherfucka’s got to go. Now!”
Having said his last word on the matter, Miles turned and walked away, leaving me speechless. When I informed Steve that we had to leave, he got really pissed off, too. He tried to tell me that we were paying Miles ten thousand dollars to participate in this program and so he was obligated to sit for the interview.
I told Steve that Miles didn’t have to do anything he didn’t want to do, that he would give back the money we had given him and that would be the end of the project. When Steve heard that, he calmed down, and we left to begin the long drive back to the Silverlake area of Los Angeles, where we were staying with friends of mine, Teresa and Walter Gordon.
There were other incidents with Steve, like the time Miles threw him out of his rehearsal studio in New York. But when I begged Miles to let us turn the tape recorder on, we still managed to tape the live rehearsal, and it became one of the highlights of the radio series. Steve got very angry over this latest rebuff, and I understood where he was coming from. It’s just that Steve’s anger wasn’t going to change anything, and in the end Steve persevered, got the program finished, and did a great job.
Still, as I said, our friendship didn’t survive the heavy-duty stress of putting together this monumental program. I’ve talked to him only once since we had a transatlantic screaming argument over the phone in the summer of 1990. I was in Prague doing shows for the Travel Channel, and he was in Philadelphia, where he lives. The argument was over my failure to deliver some text for the program. From my point of view, the timing was wrong, and I just couldn’t get it in on time. I accept the blame. It is a shame it came down to this breakup after all the hard work we put into the “Miles Davis Radio Project.” But that’s what happened, and Steve Rowland and I haven’t spoken to each other since.
davis versus marsalis
In June of 1989, Miles played Avery Fisher Hall for the Kool Jazz Festival. It was a double bill, with Miles sharing the limelight with Wynton Marsalis. The tickets went in a flash because every jazz buff and his mama in the Big Apple (and elsewhere, too) was salivating over the chance to experience these two trumpet players together on the same bill and to see, hear, and compare the two acknowledged titans of American classical music—jazz.
Wynton had once been one of Miles’ many disciples, but in 1989 he found himself at odds with the master over Miles’ continued use of the rock and pop musical vocabulary and his use of electrical instruments instead of acoustic ones. They also had different philosophies about the direction jazz should be taking. Miles wanted jazz to continue to evolve, so he married funk, rock, pop, blues, and classical European music with rap, zouk, reggae, and sounds from Brazil, Africa, and East India. Wynton felt jazz should stay classically oriented, in the best tradition of 1960s bebop and hard bop. This disagreement produced a split between the two men.
So this concert was an opportunity for fans to hear both musicians in the same evening and to see who would prevail.
I wasn’t there for the first set, which Miles opened, so I don’t know what Miles played, but it must have been the set that the New York Times music critic Peter Watrous heard and gave an unkind review to, because the second set was simply fabulous. When Margaret and I arrived, people were streaming out of the auditorium at the end of the first set, and there was a definite buzz in the air.
As always, Miles drew the hippest of hip crowds. Everyone was dressed in their very finest—or, as Miles loved to say, everyone was as “clean as a broke-dick dog.” His concerts were almost like fashion shows, with everyone watching what everyone else was wearing, which was Issey Miyake, Donna Karan, Gucci, Armani, and Versace, flowing silks, fine linen, “fly” Italian shoes, “slick” bracelets, and hip earrings—you name it, they had it on. Margaret and I were dressed in black Italian jackets—mine, by Benassi E. Vaccari, went well with my hip, blooming, peg-legged pants by Marithe Girbaud.
; Miles had gotten me two of the best tickets in the house, three rows from the stage, front and center.
Wynton played a very good opening for the second set, but he talked too much, giving lectures on the blues, on this and that to people who didn’t need to hear them; we had come to hear him play, not talk. After Wynton’s set and the intermission, everyone filed back in for Miles’ second set.
When the stage went dark, signaling the time for the Prince of Darkness to appear, an electrical current of excitement went through the packed house. After he was introduced offstage with the simple line, “Ladies and gentlemen, Miles Davis!” the dark hall was pierced by the sound of his plaintive, mournful, disembodied trumpet, coming from somewhere backstage. He was playing a tune called “New Blues,” with no accompaniment. His mute was on, but he was playing wide open, his sound filling up the hall with stark, lonely notes played with deep feeling. The hall was completely quiet. It was mesmerizing to hear him without seeing him, in that absolute silence.
By the time Miles came bopping out with that gimp-legged strut of his and walked into a single spotlight—still playing alone, but having switched from the mute to an open bell, dressed in billowing black silk pants pegged at the cuffs, a black T-shirt covered by a black-and-white checked jacket, and, of course, his wraparound space-cadet shades—he was playing so fine that everyone was stunned into silence. When he finished this a cappella blues solo, the audience gave him a standing ovation. I remember thinking to myself, “Miles sure knows how to make an entrance.” And this one was so good it had wiped whatever Wynton had played right out of most people’s minds. Then the rest of the band joined him, one by one, walking slowly onto the stage: Joseph Foley, lead bass; Kenny Garrett, alto sax and flute; Ricky Wellman, drums; Kei Akagi, keyboards; Benny Rietveld, bass; and Muyungo Jackson, percussion.
With a single nod from Miles, the band kicked into a tune entitled “Intruder,” played at an astonishingly fast tempo. The transition Miles made from slow blues to an ass-kicking up-tempo song was stunning. Miles and Garrett traded fours in the middle of the piece, an antiphonal tour de force that brought the packed house to its feet again. It went on like that for the rest of the set, with one gem after another. The band and Miles played so wonderfully that Wynton’s entire band—but without him—came and stood in front of the stage listening, their eyes bugged out, their mouths wide open. It was unforgettable. After one amazing solo, Miles walked to the lip of the stage in front of Margaret and me, pulled up his wraparound shades, and smiled and winked at us. It was beautiful, something Margaret and I will never forget. When the concert was over, people rose to their feet again, applauding, cheering, and whistling like crazy. It was an incredible evening of music.
cloud nine
When our book, Miles: The Autobiography, finally came out in late September of 1989, it received a great deal of attention. Amandla had just been released to great critical acclaim the month before and was selling very well. The album ignited interest in the book, and a large spread on Miles—with an excerpt from the book—in Vanity Fair also helped. Miles and I were on cloud nine.
But not all of the attention was positive. The book was quite controversial because of what Miles had to say and how he said it. Many people objected to what they thought was his excessive use of profanity, and they came down hard on me for not editing it out. But that’s the way Miles talked. Some readers were angry and disappointed about the way he revealed himself to be an occasionally harsh and brutal person. But he was like that, too. He told the truth in our book, and I deeply respected him for not trying to whitewash his life. That took courage. Still others hated that he shattered their perception of his “cool” persona by coming clean and being truthful about so many unpleasant parts of his life. It was as if he was deconstructing his own myth and legend. This left many of his admirers unhappy because they would have preferred to continue to believe in the mythology about Miles that they had constructed. Most people want their heroes to be perfect. Many readers didn’t like the idea that Miles was just another flawed human being. Some readers would have preferred for Miles to have kept his mouth shut about some of the facts he revealed in the book, especially his treatment of women. I know this is so because a great many of his fans told me that.
But the majority of those who read the book loved it for the same reason that it was hated: for Miles’ truthfulness and his language. I know one thing for sure: almost every musician I knew read the book—most of them two or three times—and it was a big hit with them.
For many, the book instantly became a classic, reaching almost cult status. Readers told me so everywhere I went. It was amazing. I know it increased the audience for my own work, because sales went up for my books of poetry after it was published. It also didn’t hurt my sales one bit that Bill Moyers did a profile of me for his award-winning PBS series on poets, “The Power of the Word,” which came out that same September. Suddenly, I seemed to be everywhere. That kind of exposure is something that most contemporary poets never experience in their lifetimes, with the possible exceptions of the late Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka. Much of my name recognition as a poet was due to my coauthorship of Miles’ book and the Moyers PBS series.
Miles loved the book. He told me so on many occasions. As a matter of fact, when I delivered the manuscript to him for his final perusal in October of 1988, he called me after he had read it, laughing hysterically and wanting to know how I had managed to nail his speaking voice, his inflections and cadences, as I had. Hearing him say how much he enjoyed the book was a very happy moment for me. Truly. I had worked hard on it, going to Haiti in the spring of 1988 to be alone with Miles’ words on tape and in transcripts so I could absorb the rhythms and subtleties of his speech. I broke three typewriters (manual and electric) working on the book.
I had interviewed scores of people to get their takes on Miles. I wanted readers to feel as though they were sitting across from Miles and he was talking directly to them. That’s the kind of intimacy I was after. I wanted it to seem like a one-on-one exchange, with him telling his story directly to each and every reader. I believe I achieved that.
I wrote the entire book without showing it to Miles until I had finished with it. I told him this at the beginning, that this is how I work, that I put everything in, warts and all. He agreed to this process, though he did bug me from time to time to let him see it. I refused, because I thought showing him would slow down the process. After a while he stopped asking.
Miles accepted the book as it was because, as he told me, “it was the truth.” He did worry some ove the way the book portrayed his treatment of women, but when I reminded him that this portrait was accurate, he didn’t protest. The only changes he made were when he disagreed with a date or fact.
I loved doing the book. I loved organizing it. In the end, to get the language straight, I almost had to become Miles, sort of the way an actor becomes a character. In order to get Miles’ spirit down on the page I absorbed a lot of his behavior and personality, for instance, his curtness on the telephone and his cryptic comments on almost everything. After I finished the book, I had to separate myself from him, deprogram myself, so to speak. I had to force myself to stop talking like him in order to get back to being myself.
The reaction of some of the critics, however, was perplexing. Some felt that the first part of the book had much richer portraits of people like his father, mother, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Philly Joe Jones, and others than the later parts. That was true. But there was a reason for that difference. During the latter part of his career, Miles was not particularly friendly with most of the musicians who played in his bands, with the exceptions of Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams, Ron Carter, Mtume, and Al Foster, with whom he was very close. The portraits of many of the later players were sketchier because Miles didn’t hang out with them and, consequently, he had fewer stories to tell. Some critics didn’t like the book for other reasons and that was OK; that’s their right, and thei
r job.
One of the funny things that happened around the publication of the hardback edition had to do with the picture of Miles smiling on the back cover. He hated seeing himself caught smiling in photos, so we, the editors and I, conspired to keep him from seeing a proof of the back cover picture, which was shot by the French photographer Gilles Larrain. Miles equated smiling in public with black Uncle Tomming. He hated seeing Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and Dizzy Gillespie smiling or laughing in public. So he was determined he wasn’t ever going to be photographed while smiling. In public he always kept his tough-guy, no-nonsense mask in place. But I thought the photo would show his fans a more human, likable side of him, which I thought would be good for marketing. It was—but he hated it. He called me up shortly after he got his copy, and cursing and spitting into the phone, he demanded to know what my involvement had been in selecting the picture. I denied having anything to do with it, which he didn’t believe, going on to rave about a conspiracy to make him look like an Uncle Tom and a fool. I tried to humor him but he hung up the phone so hard that it made my ears ring for days. Miles could be very gentle, loving and funny, and he smiled a lot. It was just that he didn’t want the public to see that side of him. Ever.
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