Donald had promised my parents he’d take care of me, and he did. But he was a free spirit, and it’s fair to say that his kind of care wasn’t quite the same as theirs. Not long after I moved in with him, he introduced me to weed. We were on the road for a gig, somewhere in the Midwest, maybe Detroit, and I just remember laughing through the whole night. That first time I tried it was great, but ultimately I didn’t really enjoy smoking weed all that much. I didn’t like being away from reality, or the way it often brought my mood down and made me feel paranoid. I’m more of a high-energy kind of person, so marijuana wasn’t really the drug for me. I did like drinking, and I got to where I could do a lot of it. But for the most part, I kept on the straight and narrow that first year in New York.
By the end of 1961, I had played on my first two records: Donald Byrd’s Royal Flush and Donald and Pepper’s quintet’s Out of This World. Donald even chose one of my own compositions to record on Royal Flush, a song called “Requiem.” At that point I didn’t have much experience writing songs. When we were kids, Wayman, Jean, and I made up one called “A Summer in the Country,” and I had written a couple when I was at Grinnell. As a local musician in Chicago I had worked on other people’s compositions, helping guys who didn’t have as much of a harmonic background, so that gave me a little more experience. I knew I wanted to compose more, and when Donald told me he was making a new record, I wrote “Requiem” in hopes that he’d like it enough to use it.
Playing on those records and getting my song recorded felt like a pretty good start. But a year after I’d arrived in New York, I still wasn’t working nearly as much as I’d expected, so in January of 1962 I decided to enroll at the Manhattan School of Music. I figured I might as well further my education rather than sitting around, so I signed up for music courses in classical composition and orchestration.
Donald had gotten his master’s from the school, and every once in a while he’d come down and meet me there for lunch. One day he walked in and saw a young pianist he knew, a guy named Larry Willis. He introduced us, and Larry looked at me and said, “You’re the Herbie Hancock?” I laughed, not sure if he was joking. But Larry didn’t have any recordings yet, and I had two, so at twenty-one I guess I was already getting some kind of reputation in New York.
The irony was, as soon as I signed up and paid for my courses, so much work started rolling in that I couldn’t even finish the semester. I played numerous gigs that winter, including one in January at Birdland with trombonist Al Grey that was recorded for his Snap Your Fingers record. Donald decided it was now time for me to take the next step.
“Herbie, it’s time for you to make your own record,” he said.
“No,” I told him. “I’m not ready.”
“Yes, you are,” he insisted. “And I’m going to tell you how to make it happen.”
Donald had a contract with Blue Note, the top jazz label, which prided itself on putting out records by the young lions of jazz—hot new players who were just starting out. Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter, and Horace Silver were all with Blue Note, and their careers were on the upswing. But there was one hitch: The executives didn’t want to take on a young artist unless they already knew he could sell records. It was the old chicken-and-egg problem, where no one will let you make a record until you’ve proved that you can make money by making a record.
But Donald had a plan. “Here’s what you do,” he said. “Go down to Alfred Lion”—one of the co-founders of Blue Note—“and tell him you’ve been drafted.” This was the brief period between the Korean War and the Vietnam War, so we weren’t fighting anywhere, but the draft was still happening. “Tell him you want to make a record before you go off to the army,” Donald said. “That’s the first thing.
“The second thing is, you have to make half the record for yourself and the other half for Blue Note,” he went on. I didn’t know what that meant, so he explained it. Half the songs on the record could be my original compositions, but for the other half I should be prepared to do covers of standards. “You’ve got to do something people know,” Donald said, “’cause that’s what’s going to sell the record. It’s a business, Herbie.”
I thought about Donald’s advice for a couple of days, especially what he’d said about original songs. I liked playing standards as much as the next guy, but I wanted to write songs that would capture people, and I found myself wondering, Why can’t record sales be driven by original compositions? I knew that composers like Horace Silver had written songs that could sell, and that his funkier tunes sold the best. Could I write a funky original song that would help me sell a record?
I wanted to write something that was authentically from the African American experience—but not about being in prison or in a chain gang or picking cotton in the South. I’m black, but I’m a northerner and a city guy—I didn’t know anything about cotton fields and chain gangs. I had lofty ideals about my integrity as a musician, and I wanted my songs to be true to my own life, so I thought, Okay, why not try to write something that speaks to my own experience as a black person from Chicago? And that’s when the figure of the watermelon man, the most ethnic character from my childhood, popped into my head.
In my South Side neighborhood in the 1940s, the watermelon man used to come through with his wagon, rolling down the alleyways to sell his wares. The alleys were paved with cobblestones, so I grew up hearing the clackety-clack, clackety-clack of his horse-drawn wagon. I’d heard that rhythmic clacking so many times, it was easy to turn it into a song pattern. But what would the melody be?
I remembered that the watermelon man used to call out in a singsong cry, “Watey-mee-low! Red, ripe watey-mee-low!” He’d shout up to people’s windows, telling them he’d “plug” the watermelon, which meant cutting them out a little triangular piece to test it. Yet even though the watermelon man was calling out rhythmically, his wail wasn’t really melodic. Then I thought about the women who would sit out on their porches, facing the alley. Whenever they’d hear him coming, they’d call out, “Hey-eyyy, watermelon man!” And there it was—the melody for my song. I wrote out a funky arrangement, with the melody lilting over a rhythmic pattern that represented the wagon wheels going over the cobblestones in the alley, and I named it “Watermelon Man.”
I really liked the song, and I was happy to have created it from a true childhood memory—a piece of my heritage. But I knew that not everybody would be thrilled with a song by a black musician called “Watermelon Man.” At that time the dominant image of black people and watermelons was a caricature of a pickaninny with braided hair, big white eyes, and shiny teeth. It was a negative caricature, and writing a song called “Watermelon Man” felt a little embarrassing. I couldn’t quite convince myself that this wasn’t a mistake.
So, just as I did with everything, I took the situation apart analytically. I asked myself two questions: Is there anything wrong with watermelons? No. Is there anything inherently wrong with the watermelon man? No. I didn’t like the fact that something as innocent and inoffensive as a watermelon had been so completely co-opted by racism, and I didn’t want to give in to it, because giving in to it felt like giving in to that victim mentality, the tendency to accept, subconsciously or otherwise, the negativity that racism directs at us.
By naming my song “Watermelon Man,” I wanted to reclaim the image. Truthfully, I was relieved, because I really did like the song and wanted to record it—and I never could come up with any alternative title that sounded right. There was a vegetable man who came clacking through those South Side alleyways, too, but that just didn’t have the same ring to it.
In the spring of 1962, at Donald’s urging, I went to meet with Alfred Lion and Frank Wolff, whom I’d already met through my work on Donald’s record Royal Flush. Alfred and Frank were German immigrants, childhood friends who immigrated to the United States and then founded Blue Note records in 1939. They both had thick accents, and some of the jazz musician
s had fun doing impersonations of them. You’d have thought people were mocking them, but the truth is, everybody could see how much heart Frank and Alfred had and how much they cared about jazz. Musicians loved them for that.
Just as Donald had advised me, the first thing I told Frank and Alfred was that I was about to be drafted. Then I told them I’d written three songs and that I could do those plus covers of two standards and a blues, for a six-song record, which was typical for a jazz LP. They asked me to play my three original compositions, and when I was finished, Alfred said, “Can you write three more original songs, Herbie?” This was surprising, because it was very unusual for Blue Note to record all original songs from a new young artist.
Maybe they heard something in “Watermelon Man” that made them believe it could sell records, so they were willing to take a chance on a whole album of originals. I was stunned—I’d walked in that day just hoping to get a record deal, and now they were offering me a better situation than I’d imagined was possible.
But we weren’t done yet. Donald had given me one other piece of advice before my meeting. “I’ll help you set up your own publishing company, because they’re gonna tell you that you have to put your compositions into their publishing company,” he’d told me. “And you have to say no.” I told Donald I was afraid to do that—afraid that Blue Note would pull out of any record deal if I did. “No, they won’t,” Donald assured me. “They’re going to record you.”
I didn’t know anything about the record business at the time, but I trusted Donald. So at the meeting, when Alfred said to me, “Of course, you’ll publish your songs through our publishing company,” I did what Donald had said.
“I’m sorry, I can’t do that,” I told him. When he asked why not, I lied and said, “Because I’ve already put them in my own publishing company.” I couldn’t believe I actually said it, and I started sweating. I just hoped these men in their suits wouldn’t crush my dream before it even got started.
“Well,” Alfred said, glancing at Frank, “I guess we can’t record you, then.” And all the air went out of me at once. I was so disappointed, I couldn’t speak. But I couldn’t go back on what I’d said. I stood up to leave, and it was just like in the movies: I was halfway out the door when Alfred suddenly said, “Herbie, wait a minute.” The two men conferred, and then Alfred said, “Okay, you can keep the publishing on your tunes.”
At the time I was just happy to have my record deal back on. Later I would see the full wisdom—and reap the full financial rewards—of Donald’s advice. The very next day I created Hancock Music, and I put all the songs from that first record, called Takin’ Off, into my publishing company. And when “Watermelon Man” became a hit, I made a lot of money from it—money that would have otherwise gone straight to Blue Note. Once again I’d managed to take a big leap in my jazz career, thanks to Donald Byrd.
We recorded Takin’ Off at Rudy van Gelder’s studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. For years Rudy was an optometrist by day and a sound engineer on the side, but in the late 1950s he built a fantastic new recording studio and started doing music full-time. Most studios had flat ceilings, but Rudy’s had a cathedral-like spiral ceiling. Not only were the acoustics amazing, but the space was designed so that the musicians could play in a semicircle, without having to be in separate rooms or having high baffles between them. That unique design made it possible for the musicians to hear each other and for Rudy to control each musician’s recording in the mix even though we were all in one room.
Rudy was famous for being super meticulous about his equipment. He wore white gloves whenever he touched anything in the studio, and the musicians knew they’d better not touch anything themselves. If you needed anything moved, even a microphone stand, you asked him to move it—because if you did it yourself, he’d stop the session and come out of the booth muttering. Even though Rudy wasn’t a big guy, he could scare the shit out of you, because he looked like he wanted to kill you if you’d touched anything.
I ended up doing a lot of records with Rudy, and he became like family to me. Years after that first recording session, I was in the studio and needed to plug my headphones into a different jack. “Rudy,” I said, “I need these headphones moved. There’s a jack right near me.” When he answered, “Go ahead, move ’em,” all the other musicians in the room looked at me in shock. I thought I’d died and gone to heaven—Rudy said I could move the headphones myself! I looked over at him, and he had a little smile on his face. That was the moment I knew I had arrived.
As we were recording the tracks for Takin’ Off I learned something new about Frank Wolff, too. When you’re laying down a track, you’re not watching anyone in the booth, because you’re just doing your thing. But when you go into the booth afterward to hear the playback, that’s when you can get an idea of what everybody else thought about the take. With Blue Note, all you had to do was watch Frank. He had this little bouncy shuffle he’d do if he was feeling the music, and if he did that during the playback, you had your take. If not, it was back into the studio to record it again. And his instincts were always right.
Alfred had suggested the personnel for the record: Billy Higgins on drums, Butch Warren on bass, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, and Dexter Gordon on saxophone. (Dexter had just gotten back from living in Denmark for a number of years, an experience that would serve him well later when he got the lead role in the movie Round Midnight, which I wrote the score for and acted in, too.) The sessions went smoothly, and the only moment I remember worrying about was just before we played “Watermelon Man.” How would Billy Higgins, who was a bebop and post-bebop drummer, play this funky tune? But Billy had this way of playing that fell somewhere between straight eighth notes and the swinging triplets of jazz, and he gave the song a great funky-jazz flavor. Everything just came together beautifully.
Takin’ Off was released in May of 1962, and it climbed to number 84 on the Billboard 100. At that time Billboard didn’t have different charts for different genres, like pop, jazz, and R&B. There was just one chart for all the records released, so for a jazz record to reach the top 100 was considered pretty good. “Watermelon Man” was the single that propelled the record, and when I started hearing it on the radio, it was really cool.
Once Takin’ Off came out, I started getting even more calls about playing with other musicians. That same year I played with Freddie Hubbard on his record Hub-Tones and with Roland Kirk on his record Domino. Another musician who had a profound effect on me was the great flute and saxophone player Eric Dolphy.
Eric was a leader in the avant-garde movement, which was a relatively new exploratory underground movement in jazz. I’d heard and admired his music—he put out four records in 1960 and 1961 and played all over New York—but I didn’t really understand how it worked. It was just so different from the kind of jazz most of the rest of us were playing—much looser, freer, and less structured. Eric invited me to go on a short tour with him in the fall of 1962, but at first I wasn’t sure I understood how to play with him.
“Do you have tunes you play?” I asked him. “Or do you all just start playing?”
Eric laughed. “Yes, we have tunes,” he told me. “We have chord changes.”
This surprised me, because the music surely didn’t sound that way. I realized that if I was going to play with Eric, I’d have to look at chord changes completely differently, because the way I’d been dealing with them wouldn’t work. I was nervous, but I thought, Maybe if I break some of the rules I normally use, that may lead me in the right direction. I decided to give it a try.
When I played with Eric, I purposefully broke rhythmic rules, harmonic rules, the rules of playing solo improvisatory lines. I just decided to go for it, extending myself into a way of playing that I’d never even considered before. It was scary to go outside the lines of what I’d spent so much time developing, but it was exhilarating, too. And I learned something really important from d
oing it: I learned to play from my guts. Playing this way took more fearlessness, more honesty, more digging down deep into my raw emotions, but the payoff was huge.
Eric was a great musician to learn from, because he was such a sweet, mellow guy, always encouraging to other musicians and open to new ideas. He was able to walk a tightrope between the conventions in jazz and the avant-garde, producing music unlike anything else out there. The sad thing is, we could have enjoyed a lot more creative, beautiful music from Eric, but he died tragically in Berlin less than two years after I played with him. He collapsed at a show, but when he was taken to the hospital, the medical staff apparently assumed he was on drugs and left him to detox. Eric didn’t do drugs—he was diabetic. If he’d gotten a shot of insulin, he might be alive today, but instead he died in that hospital at just thirty-six years of age.
The weeks I spent with Eric Dolphy in the winter of 1962–63 were a crucial step in my own development, because this was the first time I had to figure out how to fit into that kind of loose musical structure. The things I learned from Eric would influence not only how I later played with Miles Davis but the formation and evolution of the Mwandishi band, too. Playing with Eric pried open my brain as to what was possible in jazz.
And this was the beauty of being in New York’s jazz scene in the 1960s. There were so many talented musicians playing, so many different jazz directions being explored all over town, that it was like taking a master class in music. The possibilities for how to play were endless, from cool jazz to hard bop to avant-garde to Latin jazz, and you could go to any number of clubs and hear some of the best musicians in the world. We were all just like kids in a candy shop.
Herbie Hancock Page 5